The Department of Energy should improve its cost estimates for transuranic waste programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which are expected to surpass previous estimates by at least $900 million, according
to a Government Accountability Office report released yesterday. The 2006 cost estimates for the LANL transuranic waste removal project stood at $729 million, but so far about $931 million has been spent on the project and a new cost estimate under development totals about $1.6 billion. Additionally, the new estimate “may not reflect current conditions,” according to the GAO report, “partly because of uncertainty created by funding and the indefinite suspension of shipments of TRU waste to the permanent repository at DOE’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) after a radioactive release closed WIPP in February 2014. By revising the estimate to include the current understanding of project conditions, including the uncertainty at WIPP, NNSA program managers can, for example, more accurately identify cost overruns.”
There are also issues with the cost estimates for the Transuranic Waste Facility project underway. “NNSA did not sufficiently document the approach used to develop the operations and maintenance estimate, which represented about 74 percent of the TWF’s life-cycle costs, because DOE’s project management order does not require these costs to be documented when a project is approved to request funding from Congress for construction,” the report states. It recommends “that DOE revise the cost estimate for the TRU waste removal project to reflect the current understanding of project conditions and update the TWF’s cost estimate to allow better management of the project’s life-cycle costs going forward.”
