The Energy Department’s top nuclear cleanup official on Tuesday warned lawmakers of soaring remediation costs in Washington state, and faced tough questions about the agency’s plan to find more bill payers for uranium enrichment cleanup in Kentucky and Ohio.
The bombshell about escalating cleanup costs at DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. — long foreseen but little discussed in public — came close to the end of a nearly two-hour hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, where Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) prodded Monica Regalbuto, DOE’s assistant secretary for environmental management, to address the issue.
Kaptur asked Regalbuto for an updated cost estimate for the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) that Bechtel National of San Francisco is building for DOE to process some 56 million gallons of radioactive waste at the former Hanford plutonium production facility. Regalbuto repeated the 10-year-old estimate of $12.3 billion.
“Do you expect it to go up?” Kaptur asked.
“Yes,” Regalbuto said.
“A lot?” Kaptur asked.
“Yes,” Regalbuto said.
The exact amount of the increase will not be known until later this year, when DOE will update its cost and schedule estimate for WTP in a process known as rebaselining. The department will release the new baseline “once we finish the negotiations with the contractor, which will be very, very soon,” Regalbuto said.
The negotiations and rebaselining to which Regalbuto referred will cover only the parts of WTP needed to begin treating low-level Hanford waste by 2022 using the so-called direct feed low-activity waste method: the long-planned Low-Activity Waste Facility; the Analytical Laboratory that will inspect pre- and post-treatment waste samples to ensure the material going into the plant turns into the material DOE intends to come out of the plant; and miscellaneous support infrastructure such as utility buildings known in Bechtel’s contract as the Balance of Facilities.
The direct-feed low-activity waste method also requires a low-activity waste pretreatment plant that will be built by DOE’s other big liquid waste contractor at Hanford, Washington River Protection Solutions. The facility is needed because DOE is for now postponing construction of a larger pretreatment facility that, under the original WTP design, would have dealt with both high- and low-level waste.
Regalbuto declined to be more specific about the timetable for low-activity waste processing. The 20-year DOE veteran likewise did not comment to the subcommittee about a federal judge’s ruling on March 11 that WTP must be fully online and ready to treat all Hanford waste by 2036. DOE will take about a month to review the court’s decision, then brief Congress, Regalbuto said Tuesday.
Multiple DOE officials would not permit Weapons Complex Monitor to question Regalbuto after the hearing.
Also during the hearing, lawmakers pounded Regalbuto about DOE’s plan to start shoring up a roughly $20 billion shortfall in uranium enrichment cleanup funding due to open up in the early 2020s by tapping into federal funds not currently authorized for that purpose — and by levying a new fee on commercial nuclear power companies.
DOE pays for cleanup of former uranium enrichment facilities in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Paducah, Ky., and Piketon, Ohio, though the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund, which appropriations committees are authorized to fund each year based on DOE’s annual request.
For fiscal 2017, however, the agency requested no funding for that account, and instead proposed paying some $674 million in cleanup bills in the next budget year through the moribund United States Enrichment Corp. (USEC) fund — a request the Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, to the consternation of its chairman, Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), cannot grant without a change of law that must originate in a different congressional committee.
“This is simply irresponsible and risks hundreds, if not thousands, of cleanup jobs,” Simpson said. The lawmaker also blasted the change as a “budget gimmick” the White House employed so it could shift money out of the UED&D account and into administration priorities such as technology development for other DOE programs.
Regalbuto acknowledged, as DOE did in the fiscal 2017 budget justification sent to the Hill in February, that tapping into the USEC fund would require a change in federal law — a change that would have to begin with authorizing legislation in the House Energy and Commerce and Senate Energy and Natural Resources committees.
DOE’s proposed bill language for those authorizing committees is “forthcoming,” Regalbuto told the subcommittee.
Like Simpson, Kaptur wondered why, with a $20 billion shortfall looming, “your department’s proposal is to transfer a couple of hundred million dollars from one fund to another.”
“It seems to be a drop in the bucket in comparison to the projected shortfall you will be facing, and your proposal does not seem to be a comprehensive solution,” Kaptur said of DOE’s plan to pay for UED&D work with USEC funding.
Regalbuto maintained, as Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz has since the 2017 budget proposal went public, that between tapping into the USEC and other funds and compelling industry to contribute to the cleanup, DOE can finish all the uranium enrichment remediation left on its docket.
Though she carefully avoiding calling the proposal a fee on commercial power generators or their customers, Regalbuto reiterated DOE’s plan from its 2017 budget proposal to charge power companies up to $200 million a year in fees to shore up the UED&D fund, starting as soon as 2018. Regalbuto said that in 2007, when industry stopped paying into the fund, the true cost of cleaning up the government’s old uranium enrichment facilities — which for years sold fuel to commercial power plants that helped them turn a profit selling electricity — was not known.
Now, with Oak Ridge demolition expected to wrap up this year,“we do have really solid costs … based actually on a job already being executed,” Regalbuto said.
With the benefit of hindsight from the Oak Ridge cleanup, she said, “our projection is that to finish the job at Portsmouth and Paducah is going to cost between $20 billion and $22 billion.”
Industry vehemently opposed reinstating these fees in 2014, the last time Congress produced a spending bill that included new industry contributions to the UED&D fund, and has not changed its stance since.
