WC Monitor
2/9/2016
The White House on Tuesday proposed a fiscal 2017 budget that would clear the way to send tons of diluted, weapon-usable plutonium to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico and shrink the energy the Energy Department’s legacy nuclear-waste cleanup budget by just over 2 percent to about $6.1 billion.
The $6.1 billion proposal encompasses $5.23 billion for Defense Environmental Cleanup, about 1 percent lower than the 2016 appropriation; $218 million for non-defense environmental cleanup; and roughly $674 million from the United States Enrichment Corporation Fund. The latter would pay for cleanup work at DOE’s Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth sites that is currently funded through a different fund called the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund.
According to the budget summary DOE released soon after the budget request — and as reported by ExchangeMonitor Friday — the department plans to cancel construction of the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility under construction at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C. The facility was funded at $340 million in fiscal 2016. The White House proposal for 2017 calls for $270 million for a “Change in Plutonium Disposition Approach.”
Overall, the Energy Department would get $32.5 billion, including more than $2 billion in new funding. Congress approved just under $30 billion for DOE in the current budget.
Proponents of the MOX plant say it is 70 percent complete, while skeptics say it is 50 percent built. The facility would turn surplus weapon-ready plutonium into mixed-oxide fuel (MOX) fuel suitable for commercial nuclear power generators. Cost estimates for the plant vary wildly. One report from 2015 said the cost to complete the remainder of the facility was $17 million; another report put the price tag at $51 billion.
Canceling the MOX plant, something Congress is certain to buck at, would clear the way for DOE to start “a program for dilution and disposal of plutonium, enabling DOE to begin and complete targeted disposal many years sooner and at far less cost than with MOX,” DOE said in its budget summary.
The new disposal option, as DOE has long telegraphed, involves diluting the plutonium into a form suitable for storage at WIPP, according to the department’s latest budget request. A DOE-led report from 2015 said this so-called “dilute and disposal” option is the only way DOE can afford to safely get rid of surplus weapons-useable plutonium that otherwise would have to be treated at the MOX plant. WIPP would get $271 million, under the president’s request, down from nearly $305 million this year.
WIPP, scheduled to reopen later this year after a fire and radiation release in February 2014, could begin accepting shipments of diluted plutonium in 2022 or 2023, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said in a Tuesday press briefing. Shutting down the MOX plant would cost about $600 million and take “several years,” Moniz said. The dilute and disposal option is for disposing of 34 metric tons of plutonium declared surplus to defense needs after in a reciprocal arms-reduction pact finalized with Russia in 2010.
South Carolina’s powerful senior senator wasted no time slamming the proposal to shutter the MOX plant.
“The Obama Administration’s reckless proposal to terminate the MOX program, without a proven disposition plan in place, is both ill-conceived and dangerous,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Senate appropriations committee, said in a Feb. 9 press release.
Meanwhile, DOE EM’s Office of River Protection at the Hanford site near Richland, Wash., would get a roughly 6 percent boost in fiscal 2017 under the White House’s request. The administration proposed $1.5 billion, or $85 million more than the 2016 appropriation, for the office to “support the Department’s proposal to amend the Consent Decree between DOE and the State of Washington for completion of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant and retrieval of waste from 19 single shell tanks.” However, funding for Hanford’s Richland Operations Office, which oversees Columbia River corridor and central plateau cleanup work, would drop from a current $990 million to $800 million in the next budget.
The proposed budget would get the Low-Activity Waste Treatment Facility Bechtel National is building at Hanford online by 2022, according to DOE’s summary. DOE and Washington are in federal court arguing about amendments to their 2010 consent decree that sets out milestones for the cleanup project. That document called for the whole plant, including low- and high-level waste treatment facilities, to be operational by 2022. Now DOE wants a 2039 start date, while Washington is pushing for 2034. Both sides think the Low-Activity Waste Facility can be online by 2022.
In other EM line items, the Paducah Site cleanup in Kentucky would receive $272 million, a boost of nearly $4 million from fiscal 2016; the Portsmouth Site in Ohio would see over $322 million, up $33 million; and the Los Alamos National Laboratory would go from $185 million to $189 million.
The DOE proposals are all part of the Obama administration’s final spending request: a massive $4.1 trillion package the Republican majority in Congress declared a nonstarter even before it reached Capitol Hill at 10 a.m. Tuesday.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) said in a statement his panel would adhere to spending limits in the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015, which provides limited relief to the so-called sequestration cuts from the Budget Control Act of 2011.
