The Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office should reconsider what work is deemed “operations” as opposed to “capital asset projects,” the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday.
Some operations, such as treatment and storage of radioactive liquid tank waste, should be subject to the higher degree of scrutiny applied to capital projects, the government watchdog said. The GAO also said measures of success for operations are not particularly effective, posing cost and schedule risks.
In a report, GAO called on the DOE Office of Environmental Management to work with the agency’s Office of Project Management to develop common criteria for these classifications.
The 71-page report delivered to the House Energy and Commerce Committee said 77 percent of Environmental Management’s $7.2 billion budget for fiscal 2019 is classified as operations.
The GAO said the Energy Department lacks information on how the office manages operations “and cannot hold EM accountable for cost-effective and timely completion of this cleanup work, which represents a $5.5 billion investment by taxpayers in operations activities in fiscal year 2019.”
Capital asset projects must undergo reviews by independent experts and DOE’s senior leadership.
Since 2015, experts within the Office of Project Management have suggested some operations at EM, such as cleanup of radioactive liquid tank waste, should be treated as capital projects. “However, these experts also stated that EM did not respond to their concerns, even though the office has department-wide responsibilities for overseeing project management,” the GAO said.
Operations can still be considered successful even if their cost and scope baselines change, while capital asset projects are unsuccessful unless they are completed within 110 percent of their original cost and scope baseline. Projects must also do root cause analysis and include contingency funding – standards not required for operations.
Environmental Management does not follow most leading project management practices, which is a concern for GAO given the office’s environmental liability for the 16 remaining Cold War sites is $377 billion. So the DOE cleanup office needs to more picky about how its spends its money.
