ALEXANDRIA, Va. — With its budget for legacy nuclear cleanup squeezed, the Energy Department thinks remediation projects across the country could benefit from a change in strategy similar to what was laid out this summer in an expansive new framework approved for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, senior agency officials said last week at a major industry meeting.
“We have compliance requirements on the order of $8 billion a year, balanced against our budget reality, which is about six billion,” Frank Marcinowski, associate principal deputy assistant secretary for regulatory and policy affairs in DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, said during a panel discussion Thursday at the DOE’s 2016 National Cleanup Workshop.
The shortfall makes it difficult for the agency to actually finish any cleanup work under what officials here characterized as regulatory agreements with states that can be anachronistic in scope and strategy, Mark Whitney, DOE’s principal deputy assistant secretary for environmental management, said in a Thursday speech at the workshop.
A possible key to avoiding the pitfall, Whitney said, is splitting up EM’s cleanup jobs into smaller bites. The new Los Alamos National Laboratory cleanup consent order with the state of New Mexico, he added, “is an excellent template for that type of approach.”
On June 24, New Mexico and DOE agreed to a new, 192-page consent order that completely overhauled the rules for cleaning up the 70-year-old nuclear weapons lab, which is known throughout the complex as LANL. Across LANL’s 37 square miles is stored some seven decades’ worth of legacy nuclear waste generated before and during the Cold War arms race.
The old order essentially told DOE to clean up all that waste at the same time. Under the new order, the work is divided into bite-sized groups of similar tasks called campaigns. The consent order tells DOE and its contractors what to clean up, and sometimes by when, but it does not tell them how to get each job done — only that the department should follow a process established by the Environmental Protection Agency when selecting a cleanup remedy.
In a move that supporters lauded as critical and critics slammed as a fatal flaw, the new consent order also proceeds from a tactical supposition that budgets drive cleanup schedules, and not the other way around. The new LANL rules allow DOE to annually revise the schedule New Mexico has set for some cleanup campaigns, based on unexpected changes in funding from Congress and unexpected challenges at the cleanup sites themselves.
