House lawmakers this week approved a fiscal 2018 energy and water budget that would give the the Department of Energy about $30 billion and add three new cleanup projects to DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
The House Appropriations Committee agreed by voice vote Wednesday, with a few Democrat dissenters, to send the nearly $38 billion 2018 Energy and Water Development Appropriations Bill to the House floor for a vote that had not been scheduled at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor.
One source said House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), along with the heads of several other Appropriations subcommittees, want to create a so-called “minibus” measure by attaching their spending bills to the Military Construction and Veterans Affairs funding legislation for 2018. That legislation, approved by the House Appropriations Committee on June 15, was completed with more urgency than the bill that includes DOE’s 2018 budget.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) would get about $6.4 billion under the committee’s bill: less than a 1-percent cut from the 2017 level, but 2 percent less than the Trump administration’s request.
The bill would give EM $75 million to carry out three new cleanup projects, including two at active National Nuclear Security Administration facilities, according to a detailed spending breakdown included with the bill report released ahead of this week’s committee markup. The administration asked for $225 million so EM could begin remediation of an unspecified number of disused NNSA sites in 2018.
The excess facilities EM could begin work on in the budget year starting Oct. 1 — and the corresponding EM funding level for the year — are:
- The Y–12 Biology Complex at the Oak Ridge site in Tennessee; $35 million.
- The B280 Pool Type Reactor at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California; $30 million.
- The Experimental Breeder Reactor–II Reactor Dome at the Idaho Site; up to $10 million.
The House bill also asked DOE to consider consolidating the Office of River Protection and the Richland Operations Office at the agency’s sprawling Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The offices respectively manage liquid and solid waste cleanup at the former plutonium production site. River Protection and Richland would get a combined $2.4 billion under the House bill. Congress created the Office of River Protection in 1998, initially for five years of operations. Lawmakers later extended the office hrough its present sunset date of Sept. 30, 2019.
Meanwhile, the Committee bill would deny DOE’s request to prepare transuranic waste at the Livermore National Laboratory for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M., in 2018. Transuranic waste backed up at other DOE sites while WIPP was closed for nearly three years after a February 2014 radiation release.
“Newly-identified streams of transuranic wastes should not delay shipments that are already in the queue and that are required to meet cleanup commitments when alternatives may be available,” the bill report reads. The panel told NNSA to look into what those alternatives might be.
WIPP itself would receive about $323 million in 2018, matching the White House’s request. That includes $65 million to design and build a new ventilation system and new exhaust shaft to increase underground airflow in the crucial transuranic waste disposal facility. When DOE completes the upgrades it plans to begin in 2018, the agency and its contractors could mine out new waste-storage space at WIPP without having to pause waste-disposal or mine maintenance operations, as they do now.
WIPP has also been troubled by collapsing tunnels — an undesirable, though not unforeseen, consequence of ceasing crucial mine maintenance in contaminated areas after the 2014 accidents. Though no one has yet been hurt by a collapse, all of which occurred in areas of the mine essentially off limits to workers, House appropriators took note of the situation in their bill report and ordered DOE to prepare a strategy for mine maintenance at WIPP, including cost estimates. It would be published no later than 60 days after the bill became law.
Related tangientally to WIPP, DOE’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., would get $9 million to start disposing of 6 metric tons of plutonium at WIPP as part of the South Carolina site’s Plutonium Removal Project. DOE decided last year to dilute this excess plutonium and ship it to WIPP. The 6 tons is separate from a 34 metric-ton tranche of weapon-usable plutonium DOE wants to process and send to WIPP beginning next decade or so, despite Congress’ continued objection.
In another transuranic waste development, House appropriators appear willing to entertain DOE’s position that the federal government consider a long-term plan for the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Facility at the Idaho Site — a transuranic waste processing facility essentially unique in the weapons complex.
Lawmakers in the bill report told DOE to prepare a report about using “the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Facility to serve as a national or regional transuranic waste processing center.” Like the WIPP maintenance report, this document would be due 60 days after the House’s bill, or a compromise bill that retains the House report’s language, becomes law.
Outside of the Environmental Management office, the committee’s spending bill would give DOE $120 million in 2018 to license Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository in fiscal 2018. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would receive another $30 million for its side of the licensing review.
