Senate appropriators on Thursday rejected proposed cuts to cleanup programs at Department of Energy nuclear-weapon sites in a spending bill that would provide around half a billion dollars more than either this year’s budget or the White House’s request for next year.
The proposed energy and water appropriations act, published Thursday, would also go above and beyond President Joe Biden’s request to increase spending across the board at the Hanford Site in Washington State. The full House last week rejected that request in favor of keeping Hanford’s budget flat year-over-year.
The Senate-side bill, which awaited a committee vote on Friday, would increase overall spending at the Office of Environmental Management (EM) to about $8.3 billion in fiscal year 2023, up from about $7.9 billion in fiscal year 2022. That would be roughly $660 million above the Biden administration’s request.
Also under the bill, the Hanford Site would get more than $2.7 billion for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1: up about $140 million compared with fiscal year 2022 and some $120 million more than requested for cleanup of the shuttered plutonium production complex.
Unlike the flat Hanford budget approved by the House or the administration’s proposal to increase the liquid waste cleanup budget at Hanford’s Office of River Protection at the expense of solid waste cleanup at the site’s Richland Operations Office, Senate appropriators would increase the budget for both offices.
Richland would get just over $1 billion, a raise of about $55 million, and River Protection would get more than $1.7 billion, about an $85-million boost from 2022, according to a detailed bill report the Senate Appropriations Committee published Wednesday.
At the Office of River Protection, the president, House and now the early Senate mark, all call for spending about $463 million on commissioning on the Waste Treatment Immobilization and Treatment Plant (WTP) being built at Hanford by Bechtel.
The 2022 budget for the plant was $50 million. DOE and the contractor hope to start turning low-level, liquid radioactive waste into solid glass cylinders at WTP by December 2023. A revised consent decree could allow the parties until August 2025 to reach the milestone.
The Senate committee’s bill would provide $392 million in fiscal 2023 to develop a facility at WTP to convert high-level waste into glass: the next problem to tackle after low-level waste conversion begins. The 2022 EM budget had $144 million toward this purpose. DOE requested about $359 million in fiscal 2023 and the House approved $357 million.
“The bill provides significant increases across defense cleanup sites in: Washington, Idaho, California, Nevada, New Mexico, Tennessee, and South Carolina,” the committee’s majority Democrats said in a press release .
The proposal, which still must be approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee and the full Senate, would provide more than $7 billion for Defense Environmental cleanup, more than both the fiscal 2022 budget figure of $6.5 billion, which the Biden administration requested again for 2023, and the $6.7 approved by the House.
Environmental Management funding for the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the other big EM liquid-waste-cleanup site, would rise to almost $1.65 billion under the Senate committee’s mark, up from the more than $1.59 billion passed by the House and even with the 2022 appropriation.
Like the House bill and the DOE request, the Senate committee’s mark includes about $26 million for a new emergency operations center at the Savannah River Site. That’s up from the $9 million earmarked for the project by Congress in fiscal 2022.
The committee’s bill also provides $457 million for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, about equal to the $456 million approved by the House and the administration’s budget request, but more than the $443 million budgeted in 2022 for the deep-underground transuranic waste disposal site.
For EM’s Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund (UED&D), the Senate committee’s bill would appropriate $869 million, higher than the $860 million in fiscal 2022, the $841 million in the House’s 2023 DOE budget bill and the $822 million requested for the coming fiscal year. The account pays for cleanup of former uranium enrichment plants in Kentucky, Ohio and Tennessee.
The Senate mark would increase Non-defense Environmental Cleanup to about $374 million, up from the $334 million passed by the House, which equaled the fiscal 2022 appropriation. The administration sought $323 million. The account pays for cleanup of the West Valley Demonstration Project in upstate New York, among other things.
