A House Appropriations subcommittee led by a lawmaker with a local interest in the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee on Thursday voted to keep nuclear cleanup spending roughly $8.3 billion in fiscal 2024, sending the measure onto the full committee.
The House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), passed the bill on a voice vote. The ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), spoke in opposition to the version of the bill drafted by the Republican majority, saying among other things it skimped on nuclear non-proliferation efforts and clean energy plans advanced by President Joe Biden (D).
Nuclear cleanup spending in the bill is about flat compared with the 2023 appropriation, and while numbers don’t change much, the proposal would slam the brakes on the White House’s Justice40 Initiative to support minority and disadvantaged communities that have been affected by climate change issues.
Defense Environmental cleanup, the largest tranche of funding for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, would receive more than $7 billion in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, according to text of the proposal from the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee, chaired by Fleischmann.
That’s roughly equivalent to both what the Biden administration requested in March for cleanup of Cold War and Manhattan Project sites and what Congress authorized for fiscal 2023.
The Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, used to remediate gaseous diffusion plant sites at Oak Ridge, the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, would be funded at $865 million, up slightly from the $858 million sought by the White House and less than the $879 million appropriated for fiscal 2023.
Non-defense environmental cleanup, which covers sites including the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, would be set at $342 million, down $10 million from the $352 million sought by the agency, and the $359 million appropriated by Congress for the spending year ending Sept. 30.
Outside of Environmental Management, the bill would cut more than $180 million for the Justice40 Initiative and prohibits funds to be used to implement the initiative at DOE. Los Alamos has been a DOE pilot for the Biden administration effort.
