DOE report on excess facilities cleanup running late, GAO reports

A Department of Energy report to Congress about cleaning up excess nuclear weapons facilities will be a few months late next year, the Government Accountability Office reported Tuesday.

DOE’s report will arrive by June 30 instead of March 31 as required by law, according to an attachment to a letter signed by Candice Robertson, senior advisor for environmental management. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) published the letter Tuesday as part of its report “Contaminated Excess Facilities: Use of Key Practices Would Strengthen DOE’s Disposition Planning Efforts.

In the report, GAO said that DOE’s semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had 85 contaminated excess nuclear weapons facilities that will cost about $1.4 billion to deactivate and decommission. The Office of Environment Management, which Robertson has run since May, will be called in to tackle the most challenging of these sites, once it has funds from Congress to do so.

Congress ordered the GAO report on excess sites 2023 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2024. The call for the report originated in the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report on its version of the annual bill.

Cleaning up excess NNSA facilities is an oft-discussed, perennial issue that often takes a back seat to ongoing weapons and cleanup missions for lack of funds.

Responding to directives in the National Defense Authorization Acts for 2016 and 2022, DOE in 2022 drew up its first Plan for the Deactivation and Decommissioning of Nonoperational Defense Nuclear Facilities, GAO reported Tuesday.

However, DOE’s 2022 plan omitted some of the things Congress told the agency to include, such as “a list of contaminated excess facilities prioritized based on the potential to reduce risk and maximize cost savings,” GAO said.

The report that the Office of Environmental Management now plans to deliver to Congress by the end of June will include the list of NNSA facilities that DOE has by Sept. 30 deemed excess. In that respect, GAO said, its Tuesday report was a sneak preview.

GAO’s 10-month investigation of DOE’s excess facilities plans, which ended in September, relied in part on DOE data from 2023, but that was “sufficiently reliable for determining which NNSA contaminated facilities are or will be excess facilities through September 2024,” GAO said in the report.

Of the 85 excess facilities GAO identified at seven NNSA sites, the Y-12 National Security Complex has the largest looming cleanup bill. Early work on chipping away at that bill could begin soon, according to GAO’s report. NNSA planned by “later in 2024” to transfer “operational control” of the Beta 4 building to the Office of Environmental Management, GAO said in the report.

Beta 4 is one of the Y-12 buildings that will, according to DOE, become easier for the environmental management office to access as the NNSA moves the site’s fences in as part of its West End Protected Area Reduction Project, which started in 2021.

Overall at Y-12, NNSA has identified nine excess contaminated facilities and wants the Office of Environmental Management to deactivate and decommission six, according to GAO’s report.

The office will not begin any heavy lifting at NNSA sites until Congress appropriates funds for removal of excess facilities.

Even so, during the 2025 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, DOE must by law come up with a plan to transfer excess NNSA facilities to the Office of Environmental Management by March 31, 2029.