Due to a shortfall in the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, the Department of Energy is drawing upon other money in fiscal 2021 to help pay for cleanup of the government’s shuttered uranium enrichment plants.
The Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund was budgeted by Congress during the current fiscal year at $841 million — but only after $291 million was moved over from from the United States Enrichment Corporation Fund, a spokesperson for the DOE Office of Environmental Management said in a recent series of emails.
Congress authorized transferring money into the UED&D fund to avoid a situation where DOE would come up short in funding cleanup of the gaseous diffusion plants at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Paducah Site in Kentucky and the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee. DOE finished demolishing enrichment buildings Oak Ridge’s former K-25 site, now the East Tennessee Technology Park, last year.
There was a $881-million balance in the UED&D fund as of Oct. 1, 2020, the first day of the current fiscal year, according to the DOE spokesperson. Of this amount, $316-million was appropriated in prior years but was not yet disbursed, leaving $565-million available today.
So, Congress made $291-million available from the United States Enrichment Corporation Fund (USEC) to cover the shortfall in the UED&D fund during fiscal 2021. The Energy Policy Act of 1992 created the UED&D fund to pay for cleaning up the old uranium enrichment plants and to reimburse licensees of active uranium and thorium processing sites for part of their cleanup costs.
After USEC was privatized in 1998, creating what is today Centrus Energy, the USEC fund was created to help deal with uranium enrichment cleanup at federal sites where the company used to operate, according to the Government Accountability Office.
In a December 2019 report, the Government Accountability Office said the future cost of cleaning Portsmouth, Paducah and Oak Ridge was at least $28 billion, which exceeded the balance of the UED&D fund by at least $25 billion. The report also said the UED&D fund was expected to be “exhausted in 2020.”
