Energy Secretary Rick Perry suggested Tuesday he is ready to again suspend his agency’s past practice of bartering excess government uranium to help pay for environmental remediation at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
“I agree with you,” Perry told Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a vocal opponent of the practice, during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the Energy Department’s fiscal 2020 budget request.
“Can you again commit to suspending the department’s uranium barters?” Barrasso asked.
“I think I have used the term ‘it’s a poor way to run a railroad’,” Perry said. “I still agree with you the Congress needs to directly appropriate the money for Portsmouth and get out of the barter business.”
The latest DOE budget request would cut the annual Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund outlay for Portsmouth cleanup from $408 million in fiscal 2019 to roughly $356 million starting Oct. 1. The cut would be “offset by the resumption of uranium transfers (barter),” according to the budget justification for the department’s Office of Environmental Management.
The House-Senate Appropriations Conference Committee stipulated there would be no uranium barter in fiscal 2019 and provided extra funds to make up for the suspension.
The barter practice has “contributed to record-low uranium prices” – putting uranium miners out of work in Wyoming and elsewhere, Barrasso said.
Also, during Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) expressed concerns about the potential for the Environmental Management office to revise its interpretation of high-level radioactive waste, “which is the worst stuff,” by “calling it something less hazardous.”
In October 2018, DOE proposed to reinterpret its definition of high-level waste to focus more on its radiological traits and less of its source of origin.
Most of the estimated 90 million gallons of HLW left over from nuclear weapons operations is stored at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Idaho National Laboratory, the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Perry did not reply to Wyden’s comment.
