While the Joe Biden administration’s 2023 budget request would trim spending at the Hanford Site in Washington state relative to the omnibus 2022 budget passed in early March, other major cleanup sites would get year-over-year increases if Congress enacts the request.
According to a Department of Energy budget in brief published Tuesday, the Richland Operations Office at Hanford would receive $917 million in the site by site breakdown for the budget year starting Oct. 1, which represents a decrease from the final fiscal 2022 enacted level of $950 million. The Office of River Protection appropriation would be $1.6 billion or $40 million less than the funding for the current fiscal year.
The proposed Hanford budget of roughly $2.5 billion would support startup of the direct-feed low-activity waste program to convert liquid plutonium-production byproducts into a stabler glass form starting late in 2023 at the Waste Treatment Plant, according to DOE’s package.
As the annual cat-and-mouse between the executive and legislative branches began over Hanford, the Biden administration proposed raises for three other big nuclear-weapons cleanups managed by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM).
For the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the White House requested $1.72 billion, up more than 8% from $1.59 billion in fiscal 2022. In addition to continued construction of new Saltstone Disposal Units each capable of holding 32 million gallons of grouted saltstone, the request also supports use of a Next Generation Solvent at the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF). The solvent should enable SWPF to process a total volume of almost 6 million gallons in fiscal 2023. This upgrade would require a month long outage in the second quarter of the fiscal year, DOE said in the request.
The $463-million requested for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., would continue to fund infrastructure upgrades at the underground disposal site for transuranic waste. If enacted, the request would mark about a 4.5% year-over-year increase for WIPP, which received $443 million for fiscal 2022. EM has said it wants WIPP to take in 17 waste shipments a week.
Meanwhile, the EM 2023 budget proposal for the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee is $612 million, a proportionally steep increase of more than 25% from $486 million in the current fiscal year. The funding would support slab and soil remediation at the East Tennessee Technology Park, formerly the K-25 uranium enrichment complex, where the buildings have already been demolished. It would also help fund high-risk excess contaminated facilities at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex.
Out west at the Idaho National Laboratory, the request for cleanup in 2023 is $391 million, down from $443 million in the current fiscal year.
Overall, the request seeks $7.64 billion for EM. The biggest chunk of that budget is $6.9 billion for Defense Environmental Management, although, as with fiscal 2022, the Biden administration proposed siphoning some of that money — $417 million for fiscal 2023 — into the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund. That would bring the fund, which pays for cleanup of shuttered gaseous diffusion plants, up to $822 million for the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1.
EM’s non-defense Environmental Cleanup request for fiscal 2023, meanwhile, is $323 million, down about $10 million year-over-year, compared with the 2022 budget.
