As part of a largely stay-the-course fiscal year 2022 budget, DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state would get a little more money than requested for liquid waste cleanup while the National Nuclear Security Administration would get less money than requested for some smaller warhead and bomb development programs.
The full House Appropriations Committee was scheduled to mark up the NNSA budget — part of the annual energy and water development appropriations act — on Friday morning, along with the annual Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill.
Hanford’s Office of River Protection, which manages the liquid-waste side of the site, would receive $750 million under the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee’s proposed 2022 DOE budget: down some $60 million from last year but nearly $85 million more than requested to continue cleanup of some 55 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste leftover from plutonium production.
“While the budget request for [DOE] Defense Environmental Cleanup included increases at some sites, those increases were at the expense of other important cleanup activities at sites including Hanford, Idaho, and Oak Ridge,” the subcommittee wrote in a detailed bill report released Thursday morning. “The recommendation continues to fund a balanced approach that sustains the momentum of ongoing cleanup activities more consistently across all Department cleanup sites.”
Overall, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management would receive $7.8 billion under the subcommittee’s budget: a little more than the $7.6-billion budget for the current fiscal year that ends Sept. 30, which was also the administration’s request for fiscal ‘22.
Meanwhile, the subcommittee told the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) not to pursue a W80-4 warhead variant for a proposed low-yield, nuclear-tipped Sea Launched Cruise Missile, according to the bill report released Thursday. The report also denies requested funding for a service life extension for the B83 megaton-capable gravity bomb, which the Donald Trump administration in 2018 decided to keep on life support past its planned retirement.
The report does clarify that NNSA would get its requested 2022 funding to continue construction of plutonium pit production facilities that could be able to make new nuclear weapon cores at the Los Alamos National Laboratory later this decade and at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C., some time next decade.
Overall, the NNSA would receive $20 bill under the subcommittee’s bill, which is about even with the Biden administration’s request and some 2% higher than the 2021 appropriation. The NNSA Weapons Activities budget request was, however, about 3% lower than what the Trump administration’s most recent forecast predicted would be needed for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 — in raw dollars, $450 million.
Editor’s note, 07/16/2021: the story was corrected to show the difference between the subcommittee’s proposed fiscal year 2022 NNSA Weapons Activities budget and the budget the Trump administration thought the account would need for fiscal 2022.
