The head of the Energy Department’s nuclear cleanup office assured a congressional panel Wednesday she will get to the bottom of its mushrooming environmental liability.
“We are going to find out,” Assistant Secretary of Environmental Management Anne Marie White said when asked about the cause of escalating liability, by Rep. Brett Guthrie (R-Ky.), during a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce oversight and investigations subcommittee convened to address the issue.
As of fiscal 2018, the Energy Department’s total environmental liability stood at $494 billion, according to DOE’s latest financial report. Of that, $377 billion came from the 16 nuclear sites administered by the Office of Environmental Management (EM).
The office’s environmental liability grew by $214 billion between fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2018, David Trimble, Government Accountability Office director for natural resources and the environment, said in his testimony. But Environmental Management has not analyzed why this is happening, he added. If DOE officials don’t understand what is driving costs, they are not likely know how to fix address the problem, according to Trimble.
Environmental Management is preparing a study on the rise in liability, White said.
About 30% to 60% of the Environmental Management budget funds recurring tasks such as physical security and maintaining infrastructure, Trimble said. That is basically “overhead,” he noted.
Trimble, who has overseen a number of GAO reports critical of DOE remediation operations in recent years, said Environmental Management lacks a detailed program-wide strategy for tackling the worst risks. The office sometimes seems like a “confederacy of sites” rather than a whole program, he added.
White said she accepts the findings of various GAO reports, and is devoted to making improvements. “It is time to modernize our approach to EM’s cleanup mission,” she said in her testimony. This includes tapping maturing technology, updating life-cycle cost estimates, and continuing to overhaul contracting.
