Controlling the costs of multibillion-dollar Cold War cleanup projects remains a struggle for the Energy Department and its Office of Environmental Management, the DOE Office of inspector General said in a Nov. 27 special report.
In the report, the Inspector General’s Office analyzed management challenges facing the department and its semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration in fiscal 2018: contract oversight, encompassing management of contractors and subcontractors; cybersecurity; environmental cleanup; nuclear waste disposal; safeguards and security; stockpile stewardship; and infrastructure modernization. The list is nearly identical to the challenges the DOE IG cited in corresponding reports for several preceding budget years.
The latest analysis spends much space detailing ongoing issues at Environmental Management complex locations such as the Hanford Site in Washington state while also examining stockpile security and infrastructure modernization concerns at the NNSA. The findings are largely based on prior IG reports addressing issues around the DOE complex.
The Energy Department has since 1989 paid out over $164 billion for extraction, processing, and disposal of nuclear and other hazardous waste, the report says. It has completed remediation of 91 of 107 sites that were involved with government nuclear weapons work or nuclear energy research, DOE said. However, cleanup of the largest sites and primary challenges continues.
“Despite billions spent on environmental cleanup, the Department’s environmental liability has roughly doubled from a low of $176 billion in FY 1997 to the FY 2016 estimate of $372 billion,” according to the 27-page report.
The Energy Department accounted for 83 percent of the U.S. government’s $447 billion environmental liability in fiscal 2016, mostly related to nuclear waste cleanup, the IG said. It further noted that half of DOE’s liability rests with Hanford and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Cost overruns have been a problem at Hanford and elsewhere. For example, when construction of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant began at the Hanford Site in 2001, it was expected that operations would start in 2019 and the project would cost $12.2 billion. In December 2016, DOE upped the cost estimate by $4.5 billion for the plant that will solidify up to 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste left by decades of plutonium production operations at Hanford.
Bechtel National now plans to start treating low-activity radioactive waste as early as 2022, with the Waste Treatment Plant required under federal court order to begin full operations by 2036. The IG report notes that affiliates of Bechtel and AECOM agreed in November 2016 to pay $125 million to settle allegations under the False Claims Act that they made false statements to DOE by charging the government for materials, services, and testing that were deficient.
The IG also cited a number of troublesome issues at DOE sites that have been chronicled in prior reports. This includes lingering issues over contract management and procurement for the Waste Treatment Plant, quality assurance at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico that spent nearly three years offline, and failure to stay on top of cost and milestones for the West Valley Demonstration Project in western New York.
Elsewhere within DOE, the National Nuclear Security Administration seeks to ensure the safety, security, and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent. Its budget represents more than one-third of DOE’s annual spending.
The Inspector General’s Office noted there was much unplanned downtime cited in recent years at Sandia National Laboratories’ Weapons Evaluation Test Laboratory (WETL) at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas. WETL uses centrifuges and other equipment to ensure that nuclear warheads remain functional. Noise and vibration problems, followed by an unrelated fire, kept one large centrifuge from being used for testing for almost two years, the IG said.
In addition, infrastructure modernization is a growing concern for the agency. The NNSA had hoped to begin operations at the new Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., in 2018. But now full operations are unlikely until 2025, and the plant will not replace all of the enriched uranium capabilities now housed in Y-12’s aging 9212 complex, the IG said.
