With budget caps lifted, all major Department of Energy nuclear programs would see substantial year-over-year funding increases for fiscal 2018, if an omnibus spending package unveiled late last night is signed into law.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) would take home the biggest increase for the current budget year, which began on Oct. 1. The DOE nuclear-weapon subagency’s budget would soar 13 percent above 2017 levels under the government-wide spending bill.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) would get just over $7 billion for 2018. That is better than a 10-percent year-over-year increase. The White House had sought to keep EM funding about flat.
The big loser in the bill was Yucca Mountain: the proposed nuclear-waste repository in Nevada industry has been waiting for the government to build for about 30 years. The Donald Trump administration sought $120 million at DOE for Yucca, which the agency would have used to resume its application to license the repository with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Instead, the omnibus zeroes out funding for the project. However, the bill would also not mandate a restart of the Barack Obama administration’s consent-based storage policy for nuclear waste.
The NRC budget would fall about half a percent year over year to some $910 million for salaries and expenses. The White House had sought a roughly 4-percent increase for the commission as part of its effort to resume the Yucca licensing process.
Lawmakers now face a mad dash to keep the federal government from falling off a fiscal cliff after midnight Friday, when the current stopgap budget, which extended 2017 spending levels almost through the first six months of this fiscal year, expires.
President Donald Trump had not issued a formal statement of administration policy at deadline Wednesday for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, but news outlets reported he would sign the bill.
Within the NNSA, the Weapons Activities account — which manages the nation’s stockpile of nuclear warheads and materials and refurbishes aging U.S. warheads to keep them in the field — would get a 15-percent raise to more than $10.5 billion in 2018. The White House asked only for a 4-percent increase to that program this year.
As expected, there is no money in fiscal 2018 for the low-yield submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead proposed by the Trump administration’s Nuclear Posture Review in February. The soonest the NNSA could get funding for that warhead, officials have said, is fiscal 2019. Even then, the NNSA needs congressional authorization to start modifying an existing sub-launched ballistic missile warhead, the W76, for a lower yield.
Also, as expected at the NNSA, the omnibus continues to fund construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina: a massive plutonium-conversion plant the agency has sought to cancel in three successive budget requests. For 2018, funding for the facility stays flat at $335 million. That is 20 percent more than the Donald Trump administration sought this in fiscal year to wind the project down.
On the EM side of the house, the omnibus includes a combined $225 million for the Environmental Management office to take over, and begin demolishing, excess NNSA facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn. That is in line with the requested amount, and over $100 million more than either the House or the Senate were willing to provide in the draft appropriations bills they produced last summer.
The omnibus specifically provides $100 million to demolish “the B280 Pool Type Reactor and other excess facilities” at Livermore, and $125 million to start taking down the Biology Complex facilities at Y-12. The bill also provides $10 million for EM to start remediating unspecified “excess facilities and infrastructure” at Idaho National Laboratory.
The omnibus does not cordon off funding for EM takeover of excess facilities into a new spending account as the White House asked. Instead, the money is nested in new decommissioning and demolition budget lines within the site budgets.
