A new list published Tuesday by federal inspectors general called out crumbling Department of Energy nuclear infrastructure as one of the federal government’s top management challenges.
“Agencies may be hampered in performing their missions effectively because of breakdowns in essential equipment or hazards posed by unmaintained infrastructure,” the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency wrote in its first-ever “Top Management and Performance Challenges Facing Multiple Federal Agencies” report.
The inspectors general specifically fretted that DOE’s inspector general has reported “that only 50 percent of its [DOE’s] structures and facilities were considered functionally adequate to meet the mission,” and that the average age of DOE facilities supporting the nuclear-weapon stockpile is 36 years — this despite the Pentagon’s call for a modern nuclear-weapon infrastructure.
Aging DOE nuclear facilities are a perennial issue, particularly within the agency’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA): the roughly $14-billion annual operation responsible for active nuclear-weapon production facilities and laboratories.
The White House has tried to lighten the NNSA’s load by transferring facilities the agency no longer needs to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management for cleanup and demolition. The 2018 omnibus budget provides $215 million for the Environmental Management office to demolish and decontaminate the B280 Pool Type Reactor and other excess facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, and the Biology Complex facilities at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.
