The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management would get a small funding boost in fiscal 2017 under a bill approved Wednesday by the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee.
The Senate bill was not available at press time, but the proposal would give EM $6.4 billion in 2017, according to a subcommittee press release. That is just under 3 percent more than what Congress approved for 2016, and some 4.5 percent above the White House’s request for cleanup of legacy defense waste at 11 active DOE sites for the next budget year.
The Senate’s bill would also provide EM with nearly 4 percent more than a companion bill in the House, which that chamber’s Appropriations energy and water subcommittee advanced to the committee level Wednesday.
The full Senate Appropriations Committee will mark up the upper chamber’s bill Thursday morning, after which the bill and report language containing lawmakers’ line-by-line spending recommendations should be published. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the subcommittee, said his bill could be on the Senate floor as soon as Monday.
Like their counterparts in the House, Senate appropriators shot down the White House’s plan to fund cleanup of former uranium enrichment facilities at DOE’s Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth sites by tapping into the moribund U.S. Enrichment Corp. fund and levying new fees on commercial nuclear power companies.
At press time Wednesday, the full House Appropriations Committee had not scheduled a markup of that chamber’s 2017 DOE budget bill, House aides said. Usually, the full committee considers a bill seven days after it is approved by the subcommittee. The bill report, which contains a detailed breakdown of House spending priorities, would be released publicly a day before the full committee markup, the aides said.
House and Senate appropriators both declined, for now, to cancel the Mixed-Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. In its 2017 budget request, the White House proposed canceling the facility, which is intended to turn 34 metric tons of weapon-grade plutonium into commercial reactor fuel under an arms control pact with Russia finalized in 2010. The administration instead wants to downblend the plutonium, suspend it in an inert concrete mixture, and ship it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. The House bill provided $340 million for the Mixed-Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility. The Senate’s bill would provide $270 million, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said in Wednesday’s markup.
