LAS VEGAS — Both the Energy Department and one of its contractors openly acknowledged here during a meeting of nuclear cleanup experts that the agency most likely will be funded under yet another short-term federal spending bill to start fiscal 2017, once again necessitating the sort of budgetary puts and takes that bedevil project managers and their rank and file.
“Chances are, we’re likely going to be under a continuing resolution for a number of months,” Frank Marcinowski, associate principal deputy secretary for regulatory and policy affairs for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, told attendees of the ExchangeMonitor’s 2016 RadWaste Summit here in a Wednesday keynote address. “We’re just going to have to deal with that, which we seem to be doing every year. I don’t remember a year when we’ve had a budget at the beginning of the year.”
A continuing resolution is a stopgap spending measure that extends funding levels approved under the last appropriations bill to become law. In the case at hand, that means extending fiscal 2016 spending levels into the next federal budget year that begins Oct. 1. Agencies cannot start new programs under such a measure, and any project slated for a year-to-year funding increase will only get it under a continuing resolution if Congress diverts that funding from another project.
Generally, Marcinowski said, DOE will favor its high-risk liquid waste cleanups in such a constrained funding scenario, to the general detriment of demolition projects across the complex.
Asked by Weapons Complex Monitor after his keynote which demolition projects would be first against the wall if Congress passes a continuing resolution, Marcinowski demurred, saying only that lower-risk sites are typically tapped for funds first.
In response to another question, Marcinowski specifically said the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., widely acknowledged as the most dangerous demolition project in the entire DOE complex, would not be raided to fund planned plus-ups for liquid waste cleanups.
Among DOE’s needy liquid waste projects is the Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System at Hanford, which the site’s tank farm operations contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions is designing to separate solid waste and cesium from Hanford’s 56 million gallons of tank waste. The resulting low-activity liquid waste would then be piped directly into the Waste Treatment Plant Bechtel National is building at the site. Keeping the pretreatment system on track is critical to beginning treatment of Hanford’s low-activity liquid waste by Dec. 31, 2022.
“We’ll most likely see a continuing resolution,” Scott Saunders, western regional manager for management services at AECOM’s Nuclear and Environment unit, said Thursday on the RadWaste stage. Yet “an increase [in funding] is necessary to again support all those infrastructure upgrades” for DOE’s Office of River Protection at Hanford.
AECOM is the parent of Washington River Protection Solutions, and a major subcontractor on the Waste Treatment Plant.
According to the fiscal 2017 budget request the White House delivered to Capitol Hill in February, increased funding proposed for the Office of River Protection where the tank farms work is nested would pay for “design and long-lead procurement activities for the Low Activity Waste Pretreatment System.”
The White House is seeking about $1.5 billion for the office, roughly a five-percent increase compared with the 2016 appropriation. The total is split almost evenly between Bechtel’s work on the Waste Treatment Plant, and Washington River Protection Solutions’ tank operations contract. Within the total River Protection request, the White House seeks to boost spending on tank farm activities by about 11 percent to $724 million. That includes funding for “modifications to Double Shell Tank AP-107 to support feed to the Low Activity Waste Pretreatment System,” according to the White House’s budget request.
A contract modification DOE finalized in June with Washington River Protection Solutions calls for nearly $17 million of design work in fiscal 2017 for the Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System.
