Industry is again girding for a policy fight over a White House proposal to partially fund legacy uranium cleanup in Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee with private contributions that professional groups are calling a new tax on nuclear power.
At issue is the White House’s request that Congress reauthorize industry payments, via additional charges on domestic utilities, to the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund, a pot of money in the Energy Department’s Environmental Management budget reserved to pay for decommissioning and demolition projects at former DOE uranium enrichment sites in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Paducah, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio.
At the current rate of spending — between $600 million and $700 million a year — the fund will run dry around 2020, potentially forcing uranium enrichment cleanup projected to last until 2040 to compete with other cleanup projects across the DOE weapons complex for federal funding each year.
Industry argues it has already made its legally mandated contributions to those efforts, initially through fees priced into the uranium enrichment services the private sector bought from the government for 23 years through 1992, and next through mandatory contributions levied on industry by the Energy Policy Act of 1992 under the George H.W. Bush administration.
In November, industry groups including the Nuclear Energy Institute and the ad hoc Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition got wind of the White House’s plans for the 2017 budget and wrote Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and White House Office of Management and Budget Director Shaun Donovan, urging the officials not to seek private bill-payers for uranium cleanup.
Post budget-rollout, the groups maintained their stark opposition to new industry payments, which in the 2017 budget request the White House said would collect via “a special assessment on domestic utilities.”
“We continue to support the decontamination and decommissioning of uranium enrichment facilities but oppose efforts to charge electric utility consumers a third time for that purpose,” Sarah Hofmann, chair of the Nuclear Waste Strategy Coalition, wrote in a statement Wednesday. The group, which mostly represents power companies and state and local utilities, is “counting on Congress to yet again reject the President’s proposal to reinstate the uranium enrichment decontamination and decommissioning tax,” Hoffman wrote.
In a Feb. 12 statement posted to its website, the Nuclear Energy Institute, a Washington-based trade group for the nuclear energy industry, struck an even harsher tone, slamming the White House for shortchanging uranium cleanup over the years after industry kicked in some $2.6 billion under the Energy Policy Act.
“Industry recognizes that the federal government is under significant budget pressures, but reinstating unjustified taxes on utility consumers while the government has failed to meet its own obligation is outrageously unfair,” Alex Flint, senior vice president at the Nuclear Energy Institute and former staff director for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said in the statement.
Congress has lately chosen not to tackle the looming shortfall in uranium cleanup funding.
The Senate drafted language for its version of a 2015 DOE appropriations bill that would have reauthorized the UED&D Fund to match up to $200 million a year in industry contributions with more than $600 million annually from the department. However, that language was dropped from the combined appropriations package that was ultimately signed.
The first lawmakers to weigh in on DOE’s latest proposal to tap the private sector again will be those on the House Appropriations Committee. At press time on Friday, the committee had not scheduled a hearing about DOE’s Environmental Management budget, where cleanup is book-kept.
Getting industry contributions for the UED&D fund is only part of DOE’s plan for filling the looming $20 billion shortfall for uranium cleanup throughout the weapons complex . The agency also wants to access the $1.6 billion United States Enrichment Corp. Fund, which was created in 1992 to pay for operating expenses at the government-run uranium enrichment company privatized in 1996 and now known as Centrus Energy. Congress will have to change the law before DOE can spend any of that $1.6 billion on cleanup.
