For the second year in a row, the Department of Energy plans to dip into an alternate source of revenue to shore up the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund used to remediate old gaseous diffusion plants.
This is one of the highlights of a skinny version of the Joe Biden administration’s fiscal 2022 budget request for DOE, released by the White House on Friday.
Included as part of the discretionary request for DOE nuclear facility cleanup is $831 million for the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund, which would be $10 million less than what was appropriated by Congress for the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.
“The request proposes to finance this activity through approximately $416 million of appropriations from the U.S. Enrichment Corporation Fund to the UED&D Fund and appropriations from defense funding into the UED&D Fund,” according to the administration’s spending proposal. “The request does not change historical operation of the UED&D Fund.”
That gives the first Biden administration budget proposal something in common with the last budget request from the Donald Trump White House, which last year helped transfer $291 million over from the United States Enrichment Corporation Fund.
Congress has preferred this sort of arrangement when the alternative is letting DOE fall short of funds for remediating shuttered gaseous diffusion plants at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
Aside from the UED&D funding, the document does not include details on funding for the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
The $46.1-billion Department of Energy request, which includes $2.3 billion in apparent “emergency” funds, is up from the $41.8 billion enacted by Congress in fiscal 2020.
The budget request document was released one day after Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said there are discussions going on inside DOE about consent-based plans for spent fuel disposal.
