The Trump administration will take a hard look at the Energy Department’s budget for legacy nuclear waste cleanup, Energy Secretary-designate Rick Perry said Thursday during his Senate confirmation hearing.
“[P]rioritizing the funding and managing that funding in an appropriate way to clean up these waste sites is going to be very, very high on the priority list,” Perry told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, one day before Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration.
The former Texas governor testified only hours after news broke that the Trump administration has planned significant budget cuts for DOE and other federal agencies in fiscal 2018, which begins on Oct. 1. The Republican administration’s first spending plan is expected by late April.
During the more-than-three-hour hearing, Perry recanted his declaration of five years ago that the Energy Department should be abolished, telling senators whose states house major nuclear cleanup and weapons sites that he regretted the remark and has since learned more about what DOE does.
“After being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of Energy, I regret recommending its elimination,” Perry said. Speaking directly to the challenges of cleaning up both Cold War and commercial nuclear waste, he called the mission “a daunting task.”
A number of senators from states with large nuclear cleanup projects sought funding commitments for their jurisdiction from Perry, who would if confirmed have influence but not final authority on this spending.
The former Lone Star chief also got caught in a tug-of-war between senators whose states are involved in the uranium trade, and senators with significant interest in preserving DOE’s current policy of paying for legacy cleanup work by bartering parts of its uranium stockpile.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) decried DOE’s flooding the market with uranium, a thread picked up by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah).
Pitted against those two lawmakers was Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), a fierce advocate for DOE’s Portsmouth site near Piketon, Ohio. Fluor-BWXT, prime contractor on the uranium enrichment cleanup at Portsmouth, funds its operations in large part by selling government uranium bartered to it by DOE.
“Pretty much every year we’ve had to fight just to keep the cleanup in place,” Portman said. “It’s gone from a 2024 time frame to a 2044 end date, costing taxpayers, by the way, billions more by stretching it out and not being efficient about it.”
Portman asked Perry whether he would, as energy secretary, commit to a “more logical” approach to Portsmouth cleanup, including funding to “expedite” the job.
Perry hedged, saying he did not know the “deep details” of Portsmouth’s difficulties. However, he added, “my instinct tells me that this is an issue of execution, of good management.”
Perry did promise to visit the Portsmouth site, and to give “objective consideration” to restarting the American Centrifuge technology demonstration at Portsmouth that DOE defunded in 2015. Centrus Energy, prime contractor on the demo, is already well on the way to decommissioning the facility and shipping its classified hardware for permanent disposal at the Nevada National Security Site.
Meanwhile, Perry told committee Ranking Member Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) that he would work with her to secure funds for the Hanford Site remediation near Richland, Wash. The state of the former plutonium production site, the largest liquid-waste cleanup in the complex, is “one of the real failures” of the departed Obama administration’s DOE, Perry told Cantwell.
Without offering specifics, Perry promised to work with Cantwell to keep workers at Hanford safe from toxic fumes leaking from the site’s underground tank farms. DOE and tank farms contractor Washington River Protection Solutions are currently locked in a lawsuit with Washington state, labor representatives, and a nongovernmental nuclear watchdog over safety conditions at the tank farms.
One unequivocal commitment Perry did make was to Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). Perry assured New Mexico’s junior senator that the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, lately recovered from a pair of accidents that closed it for nearly three years, will remain funded.
Throughout the hearing, Perry defended himself against criticism that, unlike his two immediate predecessors, he is not a nuclear physicist.
“One of the things that I bring to you is my 14 years of managing [the] 12th largest economy in the world,” Perry told the committee. “On a daily basis, I will have men and women who I trust, who have the expertise and who have the authority to be able to implement these [DOE] programs.”
More than two-thirds of the Energy Department’s $30-billion-a-year budget is dedicated to nuclear weapons or nuclear waste. The semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages upkeep of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile, has a roughly $13-billion annual budget. The Office of Environmental Management, which manages cleanup of Cold War nuclear waste, receives about $6 billion per year.
Perry faced tough questions from some Democrats over his stance on climate change, but his hearing was largely free of contention. Assuming the committee approves of his nomination, Perry would next have to be confirmed by the full Senate. He would need a simple majority on the floor.