The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would receive $118 million in its upcoming budget for continued cleanup of former federal nuclear sites, under the fiscal 2018 funding proposal released Tuesday by the White House.
The funding level for the Army Corps’ Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) is the same as listed in a budget spreadsheet leaked last week to the Washington, D.C., think tank Third Way.
If Congress approves the spending plan, FUSRAP would receive $6 million more than it did via the omnibus appropriations bill President Donald Trump signed into law earlier this month for the current fiscal 2017. In its last budget, the Obama administration had requested only about $100 million in FUSRAP funding for the budget through Sept. 30.
FUSRAP is charged with remediation of facilities contaminated by weapons and civilian energy programs managed by the Manhattan Engineer District and Atomic Energy Commission from the 1940s to the 1960s.
The budget plan covers 19 projects in seven states, with funding levels ranging from $50,000 to $36.5 million.
“The budget does not propose any new starts, choosing instead to advancing ongoing work and maintaining our existing infrastructure,” Doug Lamont, senior official performing the duties of the assistant secretary of the Army for civil works, said Wednesday during a hearing on the Corps of Engineers budget proposals before the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee.
That top FUSRAP allocation would be directed to the Maywood Site in New Jersey, which involves cleanup of soil contaminated with thorium, radium, and uranium on 92 private and government-owned properties about 13 miles from Newark. The contamination was the byproduct of rare earths and thorium processing operations at the Maywood Chemical Works from the beginning of the 20th century to 1959.
Notably not featured in the budget is the West Lake Landfill in Missouri, an Environmental Protection Agency remediation site that locals have for years urged be transferred to the Army Corps of Engineers. The site, which contains waste from the former uranium production facility at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works in St. Louis, is adjacent to the Bridgeton Landfill, where an underground fire has smoldered since 2010.
FUSRAP falls under the Army Corps’ civil works budget, which would receive just over $5 billion in fiscal 2018. That would be almost $1 billion less than the work received in the current budget. During the hearing on Wednesday, subcommittee Ranking Member Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) said she would work to recover some of that funding.
