The House Appropriations Committee’s energy and water development spending plan for fiscal 2021 sustains the prohibition on Energy Department sales or barter of government-controlled uranium to help pay for remediation at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
“The Committee continues to reject any attempt to barter, transfer, or sell uranium to pay for Portsmouth cleanup costs,” according to language of the bill that passed out of the committee Monday in a 31-20 vote.
The legislation would keep funding for the DOE Office of Energy Management at the 2020 amount of almost $7.5 billion, far more than the $6.1 billion requested by the Donald Trump administration.
Portsmouth would receive $430 million through the Uranium Enrichment, Decontamination, and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund, $12 million more than the $418 million it received from that account in fiscal 2020. The Energy Department requested about $415 million. The UED&D provides the bulk of the funding for Portsmouth.
On the issue of uranium barter, the House Appropriations Committee concurred with the Trump administration. In the budget plan issued in February, the Energy Department said it would not conduct any uranium trading for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1.
In a report issued in April, DOE reaffirmed its position on the process, which involves sale of excess government uranium in order to compensate for potential shortfalls in remediation funding.
For nearly a decade until 2018 the agency bartered excess uranium from the government inventory in return for services Environmental Management (EM) cleanup sites, primarily the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant facility in Pike County, Ohio, the report notes.
The agency would barter uranium until 2018 to cleanup contractor Fluor-BWXT Portsmouth, which then would sell it on the open market. But the April report notes in fiscal 2020 the agency received the appropriations necessary to complete the annual work without bartering uranium. Then-Energy Secretary Rick Perry agreed with congressional critics of the program, telling a congressional panel in 2019 that barter was “no way to run a railroad.”
