The Department of Energy’s nuclear remediation office should draft clearer guidance to differentiate contractor work that directly advances cleanup from other chores, the Government Accountability Office said in a report published Monday.
Until it does, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) lacks a clear understanding of how much of its multi-billion-dollar budget directly hastens cleanup, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in the report.
Broadly, EM defines work that directly supports cleanup as “progress,” as opposed to “base” operations less directly tied to remediation, GAO said in the report. The latter can include anything from worker safety to road maintenance. GAO favors a multi-part “decision tree” for classifying site work, beginning with an assessment of whether a task directly supports cleanup and, if not, whether it meets a mandatory legal or technical requirement.
Over time, Environmental Management has pushed for a more uniform definition for base work, but field representatives of the 15 cleanup sites pushed back, “citing the unique aspects of each site’s activities,” GAO said.
“By providing guidance that includes clear definitions, EM management could better weigh options for prioritizing funding,” GAO said in the report.
By GAO’s calculations, base operations, not directly tied to cleanup, accounted for $3.1 billion or 42% of President Joe Biden’s $7.5-billion budget request for the cleanup office in fiscal 2022.
“Across the 15 EM sites, there was variance in the percentage of a site’s budget categorized as base operations and in how sites categorized activities as base operations or progress during the budget formulation process,” which GAO attributes in part to murky DOE guidance.
A chart included with GAO’s report said fiscal 2022 base operations costs ran as high as 65% of the budget request at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, a site for which EM is almost wholly responsible, to zero at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico, a site with a minimal EM involvement.
Sandia officials categorize groundwater monitoring well data collection as progress activity, while similar work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California is considered base operations, GAO said. Both sites are managed primarily by the National Nuclear Security Administration, which pays most of their operational costs.
Both the Hanford Site in Washington state and Savannah River do tank waste management tasks, though Hanford classifies this work as cleanup progress while Savannah River dubs it base operations, GAO said.
The GAO report said various government requirements drive up base costs. This includes spending on everything from protecting workers at the Hanford Site from tank vapors to increased outlays on cyber security and cutting greenhouse gas emissions at DOE facilities nationally. Inflation and staff turnover also add indirect expenses.
