The Government Accountability Office says in a recent report the Department of Energy should better evaluate and prioritize research and development needs across the weapons complex, rather than relying so much on individual field offices and national labs.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) also said in the report released Thursday that DOE’s assistant secretary for environmental management should start developing a common definition of research and development (R&D) across the Office of Environmental Management (EM) complex and track spending on such efforts.
The recommendations would better enable the DOE cleanup office to make more “risk-informed” decisions, according to the report.
The $7-billion-plus office in charge of cleaning up Cold War and Manhattan Protect sites “does not have a formal system to collect information on R&D activities across the complex, which would enable it to monitor and evaluate the activities’ outcomes,” GAO said.
There are several EM offices with a hand in R&D. The group is led by the Technology Development Office. Others are the Laboratory Policy Office that oversees the Savannah River National Laboratory and works with a consortium of 11 labs, the Office for Regulatory and Policy Affairs and the 16 cleanup sites.
But the GAO said the cleanup office needs a more coordinated approach.
This is not the first time a government entity has stressed the need for more emphasis on R&D in nuclear cleanup. The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board said in 2014 that EM needs to develop new technology if it hopes to meet its cleanup mission “at any reasonable cost.”
The latest report said in a footnote the percentage of EM’s budget devoted to R&D has shrunk over the years. In the period between 1989 and 2002 about 5.5% of the cleanup branch’s budget went toward this purpose. By contract, in fiscal 2021 R&D accounted for slightly less than half of 1%. Meanwhile, the office’s environmental liability has ballooned from $163 billion in fiscal 2011 to $406 billion in fiscal 2020.
“The actions necessary to address the GAO recommendations are already being taken,” Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management William “Ike” White said in an Oct. 18 response letter to the federal watchdog, which is included in the GAO report.
