DOE’s nuclear cleanup office needs program management upgrades, GAO says

The Department of Energy’s $8-billion nuclear cleanup branch has started implementing some best practices sought by the Government Accountability Office but still has far to go, according to a report out Monday.

The DOE Office of Environmental Management “is updating its site-specific life-cycle cost and schedule estimates to use as baselines to track progress and monitor site work by government officials,” according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released this week. 

But the office still lacks a detailed, program-wide, integrated master schedule, “which is the focal point of program management,” GAO said.

The DOE branch in charge of remediating 15 Cold War and Manhattan Project properties “has spent over $215 billion since its creation in 1989 to clean up hazardous and radioactive waste,” GAO said in the report. But Environmental Management needs a better “accountability and oversight mechanism for a program approaching $900 billion in estimated life-cycle costs,” GAO said in the report.

As things stand now, Environmental Management is “not required to report on the root causes and the status of implementing corrective actions to ensure corrective actions are implemented in a timely and adequate manner,” GAO said.

The watchdog was asked by Congress to review Environmental Management’s implementation of its 2020 Program Management Protocol. The GAO report examines the cleanup office protocol and to what extent Environmental Management “has incorporated program management leading practices as it implements the protocol,” GAO said.

The Office of Environmental Management’s then-senior adviser William (Ike) White said in a May 24, letter appended to GAO’s report, that the cleanup office agrees with the recommendations made by GAO and was working to implement the changes. 

The report was addressed to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce along with its Subcommittee on Energy, Climate, and Grid Security as well as the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. A bipartisan request from the committee and subcommittees was received, in December 2021, according to GAO.