On paper at least, the Department of Energy expects 10 of the 15 remaining Cold War and Manhattan Project cleanups overseen by its $7.6-billion Office of Environmental Management to be cleaned up within 25 years.
That is according to the annual chart of the Environmental Management’s (EM) office’s project schedule range, included in the 490-page detailed justification for the fiscal 2023 budget request. DOE released the full EM budget request on Friday.
In March, the DOE announced cleanup was finished at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, reducing the number of sites from 16 to 15.
The schedule included in the budget document said full remediation of the Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) in New York should be done by 2025. After Amentum finished its work at the site, EM announced in December 2020 it was transferring the property back to its owner, the Office of Naval Reactors. Two-dozen canisters of transuranic waste remain at the site.
SPRU would notionally be followed by the Nevada Nuclear Security Site in 2030; the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and the Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, both in 2031. Moab’s tailings pile in Utah should be cleaned up by 2033. In addition, the currently contemplated Los Alamos National Laboratory remediation could finish by 2036.
Cleanup of the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York should be done around 2043 and the same goes for the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, according to EM’s latest project schedule. Next in line would be the Energy Technology Engineering Center at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory in California by 2045, and then the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee by 2047.
Cleanup of the Idaho National Laboratory, the Paducah Site in Kentucky, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico are currently penciled in for various points between 2050 and 2070.
The DOE’s best guess on remediation of the Hanford Site in Washington state, which brings up the rear, is between 2078 and 2091.