Spending bills unveiled this week unambiguously torpedoed the White House’s plan to pay for cleanup of former uranium enrichment facilities with new mandatory spending and new fees on commercial nuclear power.
The House and Senate proposals differ on how much to spend on these activities in fiscal 2017, but both chambers agreed the White House’s plan to tap into a moribund fund that once paid for operations of the now-private U.S. Enrichment Corp. (USEC) was unacceptable, as was DOE’s idea to supplement those dollars with a new fee on utilities. Both ideas, intended to plug a $20 billion shortfall in uranium cleanup funding, would require changes in federal law that are under the jurisdiction of authorizing, rather than appropriations, committees.
DOE’s plan, part of the fiscal 2017 budget request the White House released in February, called for a new mandatory spending line — a yearly federal obligation over which appropriations committees have little real control, and which must be offset by either new taxes or cuts to other programs — by tapping into the $1.6 billion USEC fund. DOE proposed a $673 million withdrawal for fiscal 2017.
Instead, the House and Senate told DOE to keep funding uranium enrichment cleanup through the congressionally controlled discretionary Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) fund that has traditionally paid for these accounts. A bill slated for markup by the House Appropriations Committee on Tuesday would provide just under $700 million in UED&D funding. A bill the Senate advanced to the floor Thursday would provide more than $715 million.
The money pays for ongoing cleanup of former uranium enrichment facilities at DOE’s Oak Ridge, Tenn., Paducah, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio, sites.
DOE contends industry, which ceased paying into the UED&D fund through fees in 2007, has not paid its fair share of cleanup costs, despite profiting from burning government-refined uranium.
Industry, through trade groups such as the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute, argued that it has paid its fair share, and that the government is to blame for failing to gauge the cleanup costs properly.
Congress appears for now to have sided with industry, quashing the proposed mandatory USEC spending and dismissing the White House’s proposal to offset that spending through the UED&D fund, which under the administration’s proposal would get up to $200 million a year in annual fees from commercial nuclear companies, plus a yearly government contribution of up to $600 million.
Still, it is effectively a kick of the can by Congress, which has offered no alternative so far in appropriations or other bills to the looming uranium-cleanup funding shortfall. DOE estimates at the current rate of spending, between $600 million and $700 million a year, the UED&D fund will run dry around 2020. That could force uranium enrichment cleanup projected to last until 2040 to compete for federal funding with other cleanup projects across the DOE weapons complex.
In a Wednesday markup by the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) dismissed the White House’s proposal to create new mandatory spending for uranium enrichment cleanup as “wishful thinking.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the subcommittee’s ranking member, said she and Alexander preferred to focus their bill on discretionary spending only.
In a Wednesday markup by the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) took a sharp tone, deriding the administration’s proposed uranium enrichment cleanup solution as a “gimmick” that, he said, allowed the administration to plow more money into climate-change research at the expense of nuclear cleanup and other programs.
