WASHINGTON — As contractors and locals wait to learn how much more funding their Cold War nuclear-cleanup projects might get in fiscal 2018 under the Trump administration’s proposed budget increase for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, the head of that office on Wednesday focused ruminations about next year’s budget on work that hasn’t started yet.
The Trump administration in April released a limited budget blueprint that proposed a roughly $500-million year-over-year boost for the Office of Environmental Management [EM] starting Oct. 1 — with the caveat “that some of the $6.5 billion that has been dedicated to EM should be used for infrastructure and excess facilities,” Sue Cange, acting energy assistant secretary for environmental management, said in an industry-sponsored panel discussion here on Capitol Hill.
Excess facilities include those the Energy Department no longer needs for active nuclear weapons programs but cannot afford to tear down. These sites are a perennial thorn in DOE’s side that routinely put different parts of the agency in competition for limited budget dollars. They are also a perennial issue for lawmakers whose districts host the facilities, including members of the House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus who spoke here Wednesday.
In December 2016, DOE estimated its various departments and offices had almost 2,500 excess facilities among them, which would cost more than $30 billion to safely demolish.
Cange said the office she leads on a temporary basis has “been told to work on a couple of sites that have some of the highest-risk excess facilities.” She did not not identify these facilities and declined through a spokesperson to speak with Weapons Complex Monitor.
“Risk,” in this context, means the degree to which the cost of maintaining an excess facility eats into budget for operating an active weapons facility.
In its December estimate, “Plan for Deactivation and Decommissioning of Nonoperational Defense Nuclear Facilities,” DOE said it would cost about $11.5 billion to tear down the 203 highest-risk facilities in its nuclear complex. If the $500 million annual increase the Trump administration proposed in March was made permanent and earmarked solely for excess facilities, it would still take DOE more than 20 years to tear down those 203 sites.
However, it remains to be seen whether all, or merely some, of the proposed increase is intended for remediating excess facilities.
“We had some strong numbers come out in the president’s skinny budget, but there’s still some uncertainty dealing with the details,” Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), who attended the meeting in his capacity as a member of the House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus, told assembled DOE contractors, consultants, and officials.
Newhouse’s 4th Congressional District of Washington state includes DOE’s Hanford Site: EM’s largest, most expensive nuclear cleanup. The Trump administration’s full budget proposal, along with the details Newhouse is keen to examine, is expected to be published in May.
As for identifying the riskiest excess DOE nuclear facilities, it is essentially guesswork at this point. The agency’s December report only split the 203 at-risk sites into categories labeled Tier 1 and Tier 2, with Tier 1 facilities designated as relatively higher-risk.
The department tagged 44 facilities as Tier 1 risks.
The most expensive of the Tier 1 facilities to tear down, at an estimated $520 million or so, is the Alpha 5 production facility at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., according to the report. Built in 1945, the building processed depleted uranium and toxic, non-uranium materials.
One senior DOE official has already made up his mind about which excess facility should be torn down first: a biology lab at the Y-12 complex in Oak Ridge nicknamed the Mouse House. The facility, long empty and disused, is owned by DOE’s Office of Science.
“We are all so tightly knit together that what I need first, not last … is the Office of Environmental Management to take down an Office of Science facility on an NNSA site,” James McConnell, NNSA’s associate administrator for safety, infrastructure, and operations.
“The old Mouse House building, we removed everything, stripped everything wall-to-wall almost 15 years ago, but the facility is still sitting there,” said Johnny Moore, manager of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Site’s Office of Science. “So I agree with Jim: I think that’s the first one I would want torn down, too. It will change the skyline at Y-12.”
The Mouse House, formally known as Y-12’s Building 9210, dates to the late 1940s. It would cost roughly $15 million to demolish, according to DOE’s December report: about 1 percent of what the department thinks it will cost to tear down the 203 highest-risk excess facilities identified so far.
“The number of facilities that are currently owned by other program offices that eventually will come to the Office of Environmental Management is also a bit daunting, I’ll say, when you think about it in terms of numbers and dollars,” Cange said.
