For the second time in two years, many groups associated with the Energy Communities Alliance — as well as a labor union at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state — are pushing for more than $7-billion in additional cleanup spending around the weapons complex.
“As the federal government looks to stimulate the economy from the impacts of COVID-19” there are probably $7.25 billion in nuclear cleanup projects that could be completed in three-to-five years at sites run by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, according to a Tuesday letter signed by leaders of 10 organizations.
For the most part, the signers are member groups within the Energy Communities Alliance, which advocates for the interests of municipalities surrounding federal nuclear complexes. One of the signers is James Hart, the president of the Metals Trades Department within the AFL-CIO, which represents much of the unionized workforce at DOE’s Hanford Site.
The signers represent communities around Hanford, the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York.
“Our organizations have consistently supported DOE’s legacy cleanup mission,” the groups said in the letter addressed to Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. Extra spending on shovel-ready projects for the Office of Environmental Management (EM) can “incentivize job training, small business participation and community development,” the groups go on to say.
The ECA letter lists several projects that could be tackled in the near future, many of them — such as acceleration of dry cask storage of spent nuclear fuel at Hanford’s Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility — were cited in EM’s recent 10-year vision statement.
If the letter has a familiar ring, it’s because last May an ECA-led coalition asked Congress for a one-time infusion of $7.25 billion in extra spending for near-term projects at EM. Indeed, the House of Representatives passed a budget appropriations bill that called for EM to share in about $3 billion in what was dubbed additional “emergency” spending.
While the emergency funding was not included in the fiscal 2021 budget signed into law during December by then-President Donald Trump, EM ended up with a total budget of almost $7.6 billion, or roughly 20% more than the almost $6.2 billion proposed by the Trump administration.
The political climate for extra EM spending could be ripe. President Joe Biden was of course vice president during the Barack Obama administration when EM received $6 billion in special funding through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Biden advocates a $2-trillion infrastructure program called the American Jobs Plan. Some Senate Republicans have counter-proposed a $568-billion infrastructure plan, USA Today reported Thursday.
Todd Shrader, the No. 2 official at EM, told chairs of the Environmental Management Site-Specific Advisory Boards this week that the cleanup office is keeping an eye on the infrastructure proposals being discussed and everything will ultimately be determined by the details hammered out by Congress and the White House.
