The Department of Energy’s environmental liability, which stands at more than a half-trillion dollars, continues to grow and most of it is concentrated in the agency’s nuclear cleanup office, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday in an update to Congress.
The DOE liability stands at $512 billion as of fiscal 2020, which is the most recent data, and the agency’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) accounts for $406 billion of the total, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a June 8 letter to Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
The EM figure, up from $402 billion in fiscal 2019, represents the projected remediation costs for 16 U.S. nuclear sites that did nuclear weapons-related work dating back to World War II.The liability figure comes from a late-March Department of Treasury report and DOE data, the GAO said in a footnote.
The cleanup liability for EM has grown steadily from $163 billion in fiscal 2011 to $406 billion in fiscal 2020. During that span, the office’s Congressionally-enacted budget has grown from $5.7 billion to $7.5 billion, GAO says.
One of the big reasons is “EM may have underestimated the cost to complete some of its largest projects” such as the Waste Treatment Plant to convert radioactive tank waste into glass at the Hanford Site in Washington state, GAO said.
“The Office of Environmental Management is committed to continuous improvements in contract and project management and in reducing the Department of Energy’s environmental liabilities,” a spokesperson for the office said in a Friday email. The spokesperson also said recent GAO documents on liability have cited the completion of demolition of gaseous diffusion plant structures at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee as well as startup of the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina along with recruitment of additional contract acquisition specialists.
The GAO has weighed in on the EM liability several times in recent years and the update touches on some of the federal watchdog’s prior themes, such as the need for risk-informed decision making. It cites the need for better contract and project management, greater consideration of alternative waste treatment methods that might prove cheaper in the longer run as well as better planning for excess contaminated facilities from the National Nuclear Security Administration that will ultimately be remediated by EM.
Addressing rising cleanup costs will require a big leadership commitment both at EM as well as “the highest levels of DOE,” Allison Bawden, the director of GAO’s natural resources and environment section, told the annual meeting of the Energy Facilities Contractors Group during an online session Thursday.
In 2017, the federal government’s environmental liabilities were added to GAO’s list of areas at risk of waste, abuse or fraud.
The governmentwide environmental liability stands at $603 billion as of fiscal 2020, Bawden told the contractors meeting. This is the government’s third largest cost, behind only the federal debt and interest and employee and veterans’ benefits.
“To be fair it is important to note that progress in this area may also benefit from Congressional action.” For example, Congress should determine if certain supplemental tank waste at the Hanford Site could be managed as “other than high-level waste,” Bawden said.
The GAO did this latest review of EM environmental liability between April and June, according to the update.
