The House Appropriations Committee’s proposed two-month stopgap spending bill for 2022 that would keep the Department of Energy cleanup office at roughly fiscal 2021 levels, but also includes a provision to prevent a shortfall in uranium cleanup funds after Oct. 1.
The plan released Tuesday by House Appropriations, and passed later the same day in a largely party line vote in the Democratic majority chamber, would maintain the DOE Office of Environmental Management at almost $7.6-billion, on a pro-rata basis, through Dec. 3. But it also complies with a White house request to prevent the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund (UED&D) from dramatically shrinking in the short term.
The proposed continuing resolution, or CR, would allow a requested $841 million transfer to UED&D from the United States Enrichment Corp. Fund during the part of fiscal year 2022 covered by the stopgap appropriations bill. The fund pays for cleanup of old uranium enrichment plants at Oak Ridge, Tenn., as well as the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
Without the change, the fund would have been stuck at the 2021 level of $291 million. Because of dwindling reserves in the UED&D fund, the DOE recently tapped other sources to keep remediation of the Cold War uranium enrichment sites going.
Continuing resolutions, now more the norm than the exception, are designed to prevent government shutdowns until Congress and the White House can align on a permanent spending bill.
Overall, the House Appropriations CR unveiled this week would be about flat with the administration’s $7.6-billion request for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management for 2022, and a little lower than appropriations bills working their way through Congress.
Energy and Water Development spending packages passed this summer by the House of Representatives and the Senate Appropriations Committee would fund DOE environmental management at about $7.8 billion and $7.7 billion respectively. At deadline, the full Senate had yet to pass its version of the DOE spending package.
Formally titled the “Extending Government Funding and Delivering Emergency Assistance Act,” the new continuing resolution would also suspend the statutory debt limit through December 2022, House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) in a statement to the House Rules Committee.
The House of Representatives’ spending plan faces an uncertain path in the Senate, where key Republicans have floated the idea of a filibuster over language that could raise the national debt limit. Congress has always voted to raise the debt limit in the past, but some in the GOP are threatening a tough line against domestic spending levels proposed by Democrats in Congress and backed by the Joe Biden administration.
Also in Congress this week the Senate Armed Services Committee released its draft of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2022.
The Senate panel’s draft would allow DOE’s Office of Environmental Management to spend $6.57-billion on defense environmental cleanup, which is the largest bloc of funding at the office devoted to remediation of Cold War sites. That compares to $6.84-billion requested by the White House, according to the spending table.
A House Armed Services Committee draft of the NDAA would grant the full amount sought in the budget request. Both House and Senate versions would exceed the fiscal 2021 defense environmental cleanup level of $6.4 billion.
As for the Senate NDAA, a report accompanying the legislation calls for the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to provide an analysis of several nuclear cleanup issues during the first half of 2022.
By March 31, 2022, the GAO should report to the committees on how things are going at uranium hexafluoride conversion plants in Paducah, Ky., and Piketon, Ohio. Likewise, by that same date the federal watchdog should also report to lawmakers on infrastructure projects and other operational issues at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Also by May 31, 2022, GAO should update the status of the Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel at the Hanford Site in Washington state, which is set to start converting low-activity waste into glass by the end of 2023. Likewise, the Senate panel calls for a report on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s study into potential near-surface disposal of Greater-Than-Class-C waste.
