Editor’s Note: DOE sub-agencies with excess facilities are required to maintain those facilities until the Environmental Management office assumes responsibility for them. An earlier version of this story said those sub-agencies were not required to pay for this maintenance.
A Department of Energy report that will determine which of the agency’s excess nuclear facilities get torn down first should be published this summer, DOE’s top nuclear cleanup official said Wednesday.
“It’s pretty much done,” Monica Regalbuto, assistant energy secretary for environmental management, told Weapons Complex Monitor Wednesday after a Capitol Hill reception hosted by the Washington-based Nuclear Energy Institute and the House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus.
The report, a product of the Excess Contaminated Facilities Working Group DOE created in early 2015, is currently circulating between DOE and the White House Office of Management and Budget for a final review. Once the White House and the agency get on the same page, the report will be released publicly, Regalbuto said.
Even if DOE misses that self-imposed deadline, the clock is ticking on the report. In the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2016, signed Nov. 25, 2015, Congress ordered the agency to produce the report within two years.
Hundreds of DOE facilities are no longer needed for active nuclear programs, but have not yet been transferred to the Office of Environmental Management for cleanup from other parts of the agency. That effectively puts these facilities into a sanctioned state of decay, because the part of DOE that operated them often defers maintenance on such facilities to pay for ongoing programs, and the Environmental Management office does not yet have the budget from Congress to begin cleanup.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, sometimes called the stimulus, enabled EM to make a small dent in this work. According to a January 2015 report by the DOE Inspector General’s Office, stimulus funding paid for cleanup at just under 60 excess sites which the office otherwise would not have touched.
However, as Regalbuto reminded the mostly-industry audience Wednesday during a panel discussion on excess facilities, DOE expects about 1,000 more facilities in the next decade to be declared excess to the nation’s nuclear needs. The department recognized that reality before Congress ordered the it to produce a report on the matter. The agency convened its working group after the DOE IG sounded the alarm last year about deteriorating conditions at contaminated facilities across the agency.
Many of these facilities belong to the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is charge of weapons and materials manufacturing for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal. Others are used by DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy, which focuses on civilian nuclear power issues, and some belong to the research-focused Office of Science.
Contractors are eager to find out which facilities DOE wants to hand over to the EM first. Some of these companies are working on World War II-era nuclear sites where operational facilities sit across from disused sites that require basic maintenance to even remain safe enough for crews to begin demolition work.
One easy poster child for the perils of deferred maintenance is the K-25 facility torn down in 2013 at DOE’s Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee. A worker for DOE’s Oak Ridge cleanup contractor at the time, Bechtel Jacobs Co., in 2006 fell through a degraded concrete floor, striking a pipe and a steel support structure in a fall that broke an arm and a leg, but did not kill him.
Ken Rueter, president and project manager for the site’s current cleanup prime, UCOR, recounted that story alongside Regalbuto at Wednesday’s panel. “You really never know what something costs until you unfortunately experience that risk,” Rueter said.
Sometimes, non-nuclear hazards stand in the way of a thorough nuclear cleanup, as in the case of Oak Ridge’s Y-12 National Security Complex. Another uranium enrichment facility built for the Manhattan Project, Y-12 leaked some 350 tons of mercury into the surrounding environment.
Given the scope of the leaks, “we need to build a mercury treatment facility to deal with the mercury before we start doing the [nuclear cleanup] work,” Kenneth Harrawood, DOE’s senior director for Y-12 Legacy Facilities Disposition, said during the panel.
That facility, however, is not yet under construction. In the meantime, DOE has spread some funding around to characterize the extent of the mercury contamination on-site. When the agency will seek funding to begin construction of a treatment facility depends on the urgency DOE ascribes to that cleanup effort in the forthcoming report on excess facilities.
The report will also try to ballpark the cost of all of this deferred cleanup work. Nobody at Wednesday’s event volunteered a guess, but Regalbuto made a grim foreshadowing.
“Projected costs are in the rough order of magnitude in the billions of dollars, and this cost will only continue to rise,” Regalbuto said.
