The $88 million top-line increase the Donald Trump administration proposed Tuesday for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management in fiscal 2018 is two-and-a-half times less than the office would spend next year to start decontaminating disused nuclear-weapon facilities now owned by DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).
The administration’s new budget plan, if approved by Congress, would provide $6.5 billion for Cold War nuclear waste cleanup managed by the Environmental Management (EM) office: about 1 percent more than the office got in the 2017 appropriations bill that became law on May 5. Overall, DOE’s budget would drop almost 9 percent in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1.
As foreshadowed in the limited budget blueprint released in March, the White House wants EM in fiscal 2018 to begin cleaning up some facilities the NNSA no longer needs for active nuclear weapons programs.
On Tuesday, the White House requested $225 million for EM “to deactivate and decommission specific high-risk excess contaminated facilities at the Y-12 National Security Complex and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory,” according to a new DOE budget document. The document did not say which specific facilities would be involved.
Turning these NNSA facilities over to EM would allow DOE “to achieve substantial risk reduction within four years” at these sites, the White House Office of Management and Budget said in an appendix to the administration’s funding proposal.
