ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The stopgap federal budget bill expected to pass next week buys Congress more time, if not much, to sort out its differences on how much the Energy Department should spend on legacy nuclear cleanup, and where, the House’s top DOE appropriator said here Thursday.
The so-called continuing resolution, or CR, would freeze spending at the current fiscal 2016 level and could pass by Sept. 23, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, said in a speech here at the 2016 National Cleanup Workshop.
“Hopefully, we will pass a short term CR to get us through to Dec. 9,” Simpson told attendees. “We will get that done by, hopefully, next Friday, and then be out of town.”
After that, “I’m hopeful that our chairman and our speaker and the majority in the Senate will tell us to get busy on doing an omnibus, or minibuses,” Simpson said. “If they would tell us to start doing that, we would actually have it ready when we come back on Dec. 9, and have those bills ready to go.”
Extending the 2016 budget that long into the lame-duck Congress would mean that, starting next Friday, the House and Senate would get just over two months for to resolve differences in their proposed spending levels for DOE legacy nuclear cleanup led by the agency’s Office of Environmental Management.
The Senate’s proposed 2017 budget for Cold War cleanup is about 3 percent higher than the House’s. Both chambers’ bills would provide over $6 billion for the budget year beginning Oct. 1. Simpson thinks he and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, can iron out the differences in their bills “probably in a couple days.”
That is, if parochial interests allow.
“I can tell that we’re getting close to the new fiscal year because now, every member that has an EM site in their district is coming up to me on the floor and saying, ‘hey, we need a few million more dollars,’” a newly bearded and typically gruff Simpson said here. The former dentist vowed to keep the beard until either an appropriations bill passed, or his wife demanded he shave.
The Senate in April approved nearly $6.4 billion for DOE environmental management operations in fiscal 2017 — about 2 percent more than the 2016 appropriation, and almost 4 percent more than what the White House sought in the budget request released in February.
The House’s version of the 2017 DOE budget would have provided almost $6.2 billion for that same work: a 1-percent cut from 2016 levels that is still roughly 0.5 percent more than what the White House requested. The House Appropriations energy and water bill died a messy death in an open amendments process in May, weighed down by policy provisions partisans deemed unpalatable, including one that would have made law an executive order that federal contractors may not discriminate against employees on the basis of gender identity.
Among the major differences between the House and Senate bills is the level of funding proposed for DOE’s Richland Operations Office, which manages cleanup of the Columbia River corridor and Central Plateau at the agency’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.
Almost 40 years after DOE assumed responsibility for the former plutonium-production site, major portions of the Richland cleanup are winding down. The Obama administration’s fiscal 2017 budget request reflects as much, requesting a year-over-year cut of more than 20 percent, to about $715 million, for that work.
This spring, however, Sens. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) bumped the Richland Operations budget to about $840 million — about 9 percent below current levels, but 17 percent more than requested, and 11 percent more than the House proposed.
To pay for that plus-up, the senators proposed smaller appropriations for other DOE cleanup sites. Among the accounts the Senate would pare back are DOE’s Idaho Site and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M. WIPP, the underground salt mine, is DOE’s only disposal facility for equipment and material contaminated by elements heavier than uranium.
The House’s version of DOE’s budget would have given $382 million to Idaho and $292 million to WIPP in the next fiscal year: respectively, 5 percent and 6 percent more than the Senate bill would provide.
Looking Out for Liquid Waste
Meanwhile, DOE and one of its contractors have carefully insulated a critical liquid waste treatment system at Hanford from the impending CR, an official with Washington River Protection Solutions said Wednesday.
“If [the continuing resolution] just lasts one quarter, I don’t think there will be hardly any impact,” Mark Lindholm, president and project manager for WRPS, said in a brief interview at the National Cleanup Workshop. “I still have to go back and do the analysis for if it lasts longer than a quarter.”
The Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System is being designed to separate low-level Hanford waste from sludgier high-level waste. This waste — about 56-million gallons, all told — is mingled together in Hanford’s tank farms, which WRPS manages under a 10-year, $6-billion tank operations contract awarded in 2008.
The pretreatment system, known as LAWPS, will funnel waste directly into the Waste Treatment Plant that Bechtel National is building at Hanford under a separate contract. DOE and its contractors plan to solidify low-activity waste into more easily storable glass beginning in 2022 in a process known as direct feed low activity waste processing. High-level waste treatment, which has suffered from technical and safety setbacks, must begin at the Waste Treatment Plant by 2036, a federal judge ruled in April.
