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 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 with disposition of depleted uranium stored at government-owned enrichment plants operated by USEC, 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.”
But there is not enough money in the USEC fund to pay for long-term cleanup of the enrichment plant sites, and a federal watchdog has recommended the USEC fund should go away since its original purposes have been completed.
Following the privatization of the U.S. Enrichment Corporation, the Government Accountability Office said in a 2015 report that the fund, then with an estimated balance of $1.6 billion, should be rescinded. The facilities to convert the depleted uranium into a more stable form have been completed at the Portsmouth and Paducah sites, the watchdog office said in the report. Legislation to rescind the USEC fund passed the House of Representatives in July 2014 but did not become law, according to the report.
The long-term future of the USEC fund remains unclear. In an update last year, the Government Accountability Office said the Congress has still not passed legislation to permanently rescind the balance of the USEC Fund, and the Donald Trump administration proposed merging the USEC Fund with the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund.
