The Government Accountability Office in separate reports this week said Congress should look for a disposal path for transuranic waste now at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, and the Department of Energy must do a better job of monitoring contractors for potential fraud.
As of February 2020, DOE reported spending about $3.1 billion on cleaning up the West Valley Demonstration Project, once the site of a Nuclear Fuel Services reprocessing plant that closed in 1972. But DOE cannot estimate the cleanup’s final cost until it decides how it will address the remaining waste, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in the report.
Because the nuclear fuel reprocessing plant was owned by a company, rather than the federal government, the DOE’s position has been that waste there is not defense-related, which complicates disposal efforts.
The DOE has been unable to dispose of the high-level and transuranic wastes at West Valley “because there are no facilities authorized to accept these wastes,” GAO said.
In 2002, the Department of Energy finished solidifying 600,000 gallons of high-level waste into glass and placed the resulting 278 canisters of transuranic-type waste in interim storage in the Main Plant Process Building. In 2016, DOE moved all the canisters to 56 storage casks on an outdoor storage pad, in order to allow eventual demolition of the Main Plant Process Building.
The DOE has identified its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico and a commercial facility operated by Waste Control Specialists (WCS) in Texas as two potentially suitable options for the transuranic waste.
But the underground salt mine in New Mexico facility is authorized to take only waste from atomic energy defense activities, “and DOE does not consider West Valley waste to be from atomic energy defense activities,” GAO said.
State regulations in Texas currently preclude disposal of the waste there, GAO said. In 2017, DOE submitted to Congress a report on all disposal options, as required by the Energy Policy Act of 2005. But DOE must await congressional action, and that hasn’t happened yet, GAO said.
The West Valley Demonstration Project Act, which became law 1980, requires DOE to take a lead role in cleanup at the state-owned 200-acre site within the Western New York Nuclear Service Center.
DOE Urged to Maker Greater Efforts to Detect Fraud
In the other GAO-related report involving nuclear cleanup, the congressional watchdog called for DOE to enact better assessments of fraud risk.
The Department of Energy spends billions of dollars on contracts annually and GAO identified nine types of fraud, including billing schemes to bid rigging, which occurred at the DOE from 2013 to 2019.
“We found that the DOE’s methods for gathering information about its fraud risks do not capture all of the contracting fraud risks it faces,” the GAO said.
Only this past September, two contractors at DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state were forced to pay about $58 million for overbilling under a settlement agreement with the Department of Justice, the GAO report notes. Bechtel and the company now known as Amentum denied any wrongdoing.
Longer ago, an employee of a subcontractor at the Savannah River site in South Carolina created fraudulent invoices although no goods were ever received. “This scheme took place over several years starting in 2009, and resulted in a loss of over $6 million,” GAO said.
The DOE has taken some steps and is planning others to demonstrate a commitment to combat fraud and assess its contracting fraud risks, according to the report. “However, GAO found that DOE has not assessed the full range of contracting fraud risks it faces.” Specifically, GAO found DOE’s methods for gathering information about its fraud risks captures selected fraud risks—rather than all fraud risks—facing DOE programs.”
