Nuclear waste and the billions of dollars the Energy Department spends each year to clean it up do not go away after a presidential campaign — even a grinding, vitriolic campaign like the one Donald Trump won Tuesday —and nobody knows it better than business.
As common after an election as calls for unity from the president-elect are careful pronouncements from contractors that no matter who is president, they will keep doing what industry does: working and making money.
The parent companies of some of the biggest contractors in the DOE Environmental Management (EM) complex said as much this week following Tuesday’s election.
“CH2M remains focused on safely delivering distinctive, sustainable solutions for the clients and communities we serve, including priority improvements to our nation’s infrastructure,” Terry Ruhl, the Englewood, Colo., company’s lead executive for national transportation infrastructure, said by email Wednesday.
CH2M is the parent company of DOE’s lead solid- and groundwater cleanup contractor at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.
“The United States has long been committed to cleaning up legacy waste and addressing environmental concerns at its nuclear weapons production sites. BWXT has been at the forefront of those efforts for many years, and we look forward to continuing that work for the Department of Energy,” the Lynchburg, Va.-based company said in a statement provided Wednesday by spokesman Jud Simmons.
BWX Technologies has a big presence at DOE’s Portsmouth and Paducah sites, where it helms various facets of uranium-enrichment cleanup, and at the department’s West Valley Site in upstate New York.
“We remain focused on the safety and work we do at the sites and look forward to our continued support of the Department’s cleanup mission,” Fluor Corp., of Irving, Texas, said Thursday through spokeswoman Annika Toenniessen.
Fluor came up big in February with a roughly $1.5-billion contract to handle solid- and liquid-waste cleanup at the Idaho Site: home of the nation’s single largest stockpile of the radioactively contaminated material and equipment known as transuranic waste. It is also one of the parent companies for the management and operations contractor of the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
Of the five companies queried by Weapons Complex Monitor this week after the historic presidential election, only two remained silent: Bechtel National, the Bechtel Corp. affiliate handling construction of the Waste Treatment Plant at the Hanford Site; and AECOM of Los Angeles, which is very nearly omnipresent across the EM complex and partners in management of, among other things, liquid waste cleanup at the Savannah River Site and operation of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.
Fred deSousa, a spokesman for Bechtel in Reston, Va., said the company does not comment on political matters. AECOM spokesman Keith Wood did not respond to multiple requests for comment this week.
Between the lines of these gingerly worded, forward-looking replies lurks a genuinely reactive sentiment one industry official expressed more candidly, once granted anonymity:
“We have legal commitments with the government to complete certain missions,” this person said. “Nothing about that has changed, and we’re focused on doing what we were hired to do.”
Speaking of governments, DOE has plenty of legal compacts with state governments whose territories are home to millions of gallons and millions of square feet of legacy nuclear waste left over from the Cold War arms race. Those in governors’ mansions across the country no doubt will be ready to present their legally binding cleanup agreements to President Trump’s new energy secretary, whoever she or he may be, some time after Jan. 20.
Until then, a look at the DOE EM budget over the past 15 years, during which power transitioned from a two-term Republican president to a two-term Democrat, provides as much insight into what this election might mean for legacy cleanup as anything else. To wit, Cold War cleanup, at least by the numbers, has been more or less non-partisan.
Adjusted for 2016 dollars, the EM budget has trended down for most of the past decade-and-a-half, which perhaps will not astonish anyone who has worked in the complex during that period of time (an epoch that began about six years into what the nearly 30 year-old EM considers its third historical era).
The sharpest drop in that sample occurred during then-President George W. Bush’s second term, after EM finished the Rocky Flats and Fernald cleanups, among others. The budget in Bush’s first term had hovered well north of $8 billion, in 2016 dollars. For most of President Barack Obama’s two terms, EM has been about a $6-billion-a-year office.
And in the end, that might be more of a headache for customer and contractor than the new boss headed to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. this January.
At an industry gathering in September, DOE EM’s top policy official reminded an audience of nuclear remediation veterans of a challenge that will transcend the election.
“Unrealistic cleanup expectations were set many years ago that assumed our program would continue to get more money every year,” said Frank Marcinowski, EM’s associate principal deputy secretary for regulatory and policy affairs. “As a result, we have compliance requirements on the order of $8 billion a year balanced against our budget reality, which is about $6 billion.”
On the subject of things that transcend elections, “the EM mission is set to run for at least another 50 years,” David Klaus, DOE deputy undersecretary for management and performance, said at the same September gathering.
So EM, having already seen six elections and three presidents since its founding in 1989, has at least another dozen elections to go, theoretically, at the $6-billion-a-year rate.
Like Marcinowski said more than a month before the polls opened, “we have a difficult situation in the EM program.”
