Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz was on the defensive this week in the first two congressional hearings of the year to dive deeply into his department’s budget request for legacy nuclear cleanup in fiscal 2017, with the White House’s proposal to change a long-established strategy for disposing of 34 metric tons of surplus, weapon-usable plutonium taking center stage.
Besides the plutonium disposal issues, Moniz was also rhetorically boxed about the ears by lawmakers from Washington and Ohio, states that, in the funding request unveiled Feb. 9, would respectively see cuts for some legacy waste cleanup and the unequivocal termination of a new domestic uranium-enrichment centrifuge plant.
The White House is obliged to get rid of the surplus plutonium under an arms control pact with Russia known as the Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement. Finalized in 2010, the deal calls for both countries to turn 34 metric tons of plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors. In the U.S., that refining would take place at the Mixed Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., which the White House’s budget request proposes canceling.
The administration, in what Moniz described as a far cheaper and technically safer approach, now wants to dilute the plutonium, mix it with a solid from which it cannot easily be separated, and store it in a facility such as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
The plan did not go over well on either side of the Hill this week, with appropriators on Monday and authorizers on Thursday asking why the administration continues to insist on a change of tack when lawmakers have consistently supported the MOX pathway.
“Congress just said ‘we want it [MOX] to happen,’” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told Moniz in a Thursday hearing of the Senate Energy and Commerce Committee. “I hope there is some guarantee MOX will continue to be constructed.”
In DOE’s $32.5 billion budget request, the White House seeks $270 million to start closing the MOX facility in fiscal 2017, which begins on Oct. 1. Congress approved $340 million for the facility as part of the 2016 omnibus spending bill signed in December; in a report appended to the bill, lawmakers instructed DOE to use the money for construction only, and not to close down the facility.
Moniz on Thursday insisted DOE is complying with that directive, but will nonetheless move to shut down the MOX plant in 2017, in the increasingly unlikely event Congress goes along with the plan. If the final 2017 spending bill that includes DOE’s budget accepts the White House’s proposal, CB&I AREVA MOX Services, the contractor building the MOX facility, would get a 90-day stop work order some time in the government’s 2017 fiscal year, Moniz told Cassidy.
Also on Thursday, Moniz took a swing at MOX facility contractor CB&I AREVA MOX Services, which the energy boss said in 2015 resisted finishing MOX construction under a restructured contract that included more fixed-price terms that limit the government’s financial exposure to its contractors’ expenses.
“Let’s just say that was not accepted,” Moniz told Cassidy. The company, Moniz said, wanted an asterisk in its deal, whereby the government would pay bills for extreme overruns. It essentially proposed “fixed cost, unless we [CB&I AREVA] go over by a lot, and then you [DOE] pay,” Moniz said Thursday.
A spokesperson for CB&I AREVA MOX Services did not reply for a request for comment by the ExchangeMonitor’s Friday deadline.
At both the Senate hearing Thursday and a House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee hearing on Monday, Moniz shot down a claim published in February by consulting firm High Bridge Associates — and paid for by one of one of the parent companies of CB&I AREVA MOX Services — that storing diluted plutonium at WIPP could cause an uncontrolled, unplanned nuclear chain reaction underground in the distant future.
“We just don’t think it’s a valid critique,” Moniz said Monday. “The scenario in the High Bridge report, with critical control overpacks containing the diluted plutonium being crushed, Sandia [National Laboratories] evaluated it as rather simplistic and not at all credible.”
Hammered on Hanford
In the upper chamber on Thursday, Energy and Commerce Ranking Member Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wa.) asked Moniz why DOE proposed a roughly $200 million cut for Hanford cleanup in areas nearest the Columbia river, which are funded within the River Corridor and Other Cleanup Operations line of DOE’s Richland Operations Office.
Of all the 16 active cleanup projects managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, Cantwell said “nothing compares to the task at hand at Hanford,” a former DOE plutonium production facility. The junior senator from Washington then asked Moniz why DOE did not provide more cleanup money for sites including the 618-10 Burial Ground, a roughly 7-acre burial pit containing Cold War-era nuclear waste, and Building 324, which sits atop contaminated groundwater near the Columbia River.
Moniz said liquid waste cleanup at Hanford, and elsewhere in the country, has priority over other activities, given DOE’s “overall constrained budget.” In addition, he said, the agency cannot safely clean up the contaminated groundwater at Building 324 without first developing new robotic technology.
Under the 2017 budget request, DOE’s Office of River Protection, the other agency arm at Hanford focused on liquid waste cleanup, would get about $1.5 billion, or 5 percent more than the 2016 appropriation.
Some of the 2017 funding reductions requested by DOE for the Richland Operations Office, $88 million or so, can be chalked up to construction projects winding down, or long-lead purchases for other projects arriving on site as expected, budget documents show. Overall, Richland Operations Office cleanup funded through EM would fall to about $715 million in 2017, nearly 30 percent below 2016 levels. The figure excludes some non-cleanup spending proposed for the site that is not funneled through EM.
Anger Over American Centrifuge
After Cantwell had her turn, an angry Sen. Robert Portman (R-Ohio) slammed Moniz for declining to provide new funding for the American Centrifuge Plant near Piketon, Ohio, which DOE decided last year to close. Some 60 workers were slated to be laid off by Friday in an initial round of job cuts at the site, while nearly another 150 will depart over the next 12 months, after they prepare hardware at the facility for cleanup and disposal.
“I’m profoundly disappointed in the ways you’ve handled the cleanup at Piketon, and the uranium enrichment technology you just pulled the plug on,” Portman said. “It’s amazing to me that we are pulling the plug on the only American-owned source on enriched uranium.”
While the plant was testing out new U.S.-designed enrichment techniques, Moniz said, as he has in prior testimony, the U.S. can scrape together enough uranium for national security needs for about another 10 years, and that the experimental machines now being decommissioned at Piketon would not have been part of a new operational enrichment plant, anyway.
“We absolutely still need a national security-based capability some time probably in the next 20 years,” Moniz told Portman. Moniz added DOE could only start work on such a capability at Piketon today “if we had several billion dollars now,” which Congress has not appropriated.
Firm on New Utility Fees
Meanwhile, Moniz also defended the White House’s proposal to fund legacy uranium enrichment cleanup at the department’s Oak Ridge, Portsmouth, and Paducah sites by tapping into a fund created in 1992 to cover operating costs at what was then a U.S.-owned enrichment company and is today the privately operated Centrus Energy Corp.
That fund DOE is eyeing is called the United States Enrichment Corporation Fund. The $1.6 billion in it would be used to cover the cost of cleanup activities usually funded through the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, under the White House’s 2017 budget request. The fund faces a major shortfall.
Because uranium enrichment cleanup is mandatory federal spending, DOE must make up the cost either by cutting projects elsewhere in the agency’s budget, or by bringing in new revenue with taxes or fees.
The White House opted in part for the latter approach, recommending in its 2017 DOE budget request that Congress approve a new fee on domestic nuclear power companies that would result in up to $200 million or so in annual industry contributions to the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, to be matched by DOE for a total annual contribution of not more than $676 million.
The nuclear industry, through trade groups, has argued against this proposal, claiming it has already paid its share of cleanup costs, initially because the government priced the cost of cleanup into the uranium enrichment services it sold to the private sector, and again through fees levied from 1992 to 2007 under the Energy Policy Act of 1992.
Moniz started hitting back against those arguments this week, saying the full cost of cleaning up after uranium enrichment was not known until recently. Last year, DOE estimated the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund faced a more than $20 billion shortfall. At the current rate of spending, it would run dry in 2020, some 20 years before the agency thinks it can finish the cleanup work for which the fund pays.
“When the fee was stopped some years back, that was at a time when the actual dimensions of the cost of cleanup were not known,” Moniz told senators Thursday.”The original principal was the users of the service ultimately pay for the cleanup as well. We are putting that forward. If there are other offsets, fine.”
