As part of a broader effort to make a dent in a roughly $20-billion shortfall for uranium cleanup, the White House in its fiscal 2017 budget plan proposed tapping into a $1.6 billion fund that has been gathering dust since 1996.
The three-year drawdown of the United States Enrichment Corp. (USEC) Fund would begin in the next budget with a $674 million withdrawal to pay for decommissioning and demolition projects at Energy Department sites in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Paducah, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio, according to the 2017 DOE budget request the White House unveiled Tuesday.
That is roughly the same level of funding Congress approved for the work in 2016 as part of the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill signed in December. Currently, cleanup at the three former uranium enrichment sites is paid for through the Uranium Enrichment Decommissioning and Demolition (UED&D) Fund. That DOE-managed fund faces a more than $20 billion shortfall and, at the current rate of spending, would run dry in 2020, some two decades before DOE thinks it can finish remediation at the three sites.
The USEC fund was created in 1992 to pay for operating expenses at the government-run uranium enrichment company privatized in 1996 and now known as Centrus Energy. The fund has sat in the U.S. Treasury for the past 20 years. In a 2015 floor speech, Sen Dan Coats (R-Ind.) dubbed the money pot a “zombie fund.”
Including USEC, UED&D, and a third fund called the Uranium Supply and Enrichment Account, DOE has about $5 billion it could use to narrow its looming uranium cleanup shortfall, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said in a Tuesday press briefing at DOE headquarters in Washington.
However, only UED&D money may legally be spent on uranium cleanup. Getting access to all $5 billion would require new authorizing legislation from Congress. Likewise, lawmakers would have to approve a perennial DOE proposal, which the agency made again in the new budget, to reauthorize new government and industry contributions to the UED&D fund. Industry has opposed making new contributions.
“That will be a discussion,” Moniz told reporters.
