WASHINGTON, D.C. — After a congressional hearing Thursday, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm said the Department of Energy thinks the startup of the waste vitrification plant at the Hanford Site in Washington will not slip too much further into the future.
“I think we have a handle on it,” Granholm told the Monitor about big DOE projects such as the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant. Now delayed until 2025 from 2023, the plant faces hurdles, “but we feel good about it, we really do,” Granholm said.
The Secretary of Energy spoke to the Exchange Monitor after a hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee hearing about DOE’s fiscal 2024 budget request.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management had until recent months been targeting a December 2023 startup for the plant, but the Joe Biden administration’s fiscal 2024 budget request now says it will happen by sometime in 2025.
As is typical this time of year, DOE’s first budget hearing of the year was light on specifics about the agency’s DOE’s $8.3 billion request for cleanup of Cold War and Manhattan Project nuclear-weapon sites. The budget for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would stay about flat in fiscal year 2024, if the Biden budget became law.
Meanwhile, in response to a question from Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-Fla.), Granholm said returning the DOE budget to fiscal 2022 levels, an idea floated by some House Republicans, could be “disastrous.”
Granholm said it could result in laying off scores of scientists at national laboratories and delaying National Nuclear Security Administration projects by a year or more.
The fiscal 2022 for Environmental Management was $7.9 billion, or $400 million below fiscal 2023’s budget and what the White House requests for fiscal 2024. Fiscal 2024 starts Oct. 1.
“The budget includes $8.3 billion for the Environmental Management program and reflects this administration’s strong commitment to clean up and protect communities that supported defense production programs and government-sponsored nuclear energy research,” Granholm said in her written testimony.
The acting head of the DOE Office of Environmental Management, William (Ike) White is expected to testify before the House Armed Services Committee Strategic Forces Subcommittee in late April, a DOE budget planner told a gathering of weapons complex advisory board leaders earlier this week.
