House and Senate spending bills produced this week would provide more money for legacy nuclear waste cleanup in fiscal 2017 than the White House requested, but quash administration proposals to dispose of weapon-grade plutonium in New Mexico and change the way the Department of Energy funds cleanup of former uranium enrichment sites.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) would fare best under a bill approved Thursday by the Senate Appropriations Committee, which would provide some $6.4 billion for cleanup in fiscal 2017 — about 2 percent more than what the office got in 2016, and almost 4 percent more than what the White House sought in the budget request released in February.
In a Wednesday markup, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee that wrote the bill, said the measure could appear on the Senate floor for consideration as early as Monday. However, no floor action was scheduled as of Friday.
The Senate’s bill would give EM about 3 percent more money in the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1 than would the House version of DOE’s 2017 budget. The House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee on Wednesday marked up a bill that would provide about $6.2 billion for legacy nuclear cleanup in 2017 — about a 1 percent cut from 2016 levels, but about 0.5 percent more than what the White House requested for 2017.
The full House Appropriations Committee will mark up that chamber’s 2017 DOE budget bill on Tuesday. The House subcommittee’s budget report, with its detailed, line-by-line spending breakdown, will be available April 18.
The House and and Senate bills both unequivocally shot down the White House’s plan to fund cleanup of former uranium enrichment facilities at DOE’s Oak Ridge, Paducah and Portsmouth sites through a combination of new mandatory spending and new fees on commercial nuclear power generators. By federal law, all mandatory spending must be offset by either cuts elsewhere in the federal budget or new taxes.
Both bills also denied, for now, the White House’s request to kill the program to convert weapon-usable plutonium into mixed-oxide commercial reactor fuel in favor of downblending the material and shipping it to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M.
While the House has yet to publish its detailed bill report, the Senate did so Thursday after its two-and-a-half-hour full-committee markup. The 100-plus-page report shows nearly every major DOE cleanup site would get more money in fiscal 2017 than in the current budget, under the Senate’s bill, and that all would fare better than under the White House’s proposal.
At the former Hanford Site plutonium production installation near Richland, Wash., the Senate proposed about $840 for DOE’s Richland Operations Office, which manages the river corridor and central plateau remediation operations. The Senate’s mark is about a 9-percent cut from fiscal 2016, but about 17 percent higher than what the White House requested.
The Senate subcommittee said it threw in extra money for Richland’s 300-296 Waste Site, 618-10 Burial Ground, groundwater cleanup, infrastructure, and community support services, because “the Department’s budget request could slow or half crucial cleanup work and threaten the Department’s compliance with its legal obligations under the Tri-Party Agreement” that governs Hanford cleanup.
For Hanford tank waste cleanup, the Senate provided about $1.5 billion for the work managed by DOE’s Office of River Protection, just under 1 percent more than requested and up some 6 percent from fiscal 2016. The bulk of that money would go to getting the Waste Treatment Plant under construction by Bechtel National partially up and running by 2022 to treat Hanford’s low-level liquid waste.
In its bill report, the Senate subcommittee said it was “aware” of a March 11 court ruling that updated a 2010 consent decree between DOE and the state of Washington to stipulate that the Waste Treatment Plant be fully operational by 2036. Lawmakers told DOE in the report to “to request sufficient funding in future budgets to ensure compliance with the 2016 Consent Decree.”
On the other side of the country at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., the Senate bill would provide just under $1.3 billion for cleanup — almost a 5-percent boost over fiscal 2016 levels, but some 2 percent less than what the White House sought. A smaller-than-requested appropriation for the Savannah River Radioactive Liquid Tank Waste Stabilization and Disposition line — the largest environmental cleanup program at the site, responsible for 36 million gallons of liquid waste — accounts for the different between the Senate and White House proposals; the Senate provided some $45 million less than requested for 2017.
Savannah River Remediation is DOE’s prime liquid-waste-cleanup contractor at Savannah River.
Like the House’s 2017 DOE budget bill, the Senate’s bill provides $26.8 million in 2017 to pay for road and infrastructure improvements under a settlement DOE finalized with the state of New Mexico in January over damage claims arising from the 2014 accidents that closed WIPP. Overall, WIPP would get almost $275 million in the Senate bill, nearly 1.5 percent more than requested and about 8.5 percent below the current budget. The drop reflects the end of spending on WIPP recovery activities. DOE expects to reopen the facility in December.
While both the House and Senate rejected the White House’s plan to send more excess plutonium to WIPP, the Senate’s bill appears to leave the door open for further debate on the subject.
The White House’s plan to change the disposal path for all or part of these 34 metric tons of nuclear material — declared surplus to defense needs under an arms control pact with Russia finalized in 2010 — centers around canceling the Mixed-Oxide (MOX) Fuel Fabrication Facility now under construction at Savannah River.
Per the agreement with Russia, the MOX plant would turn weapons-usable plutonium into fuel for commercial reactors. Russia was bound under the treaty to build a similar facility to deal with its own stockpile of surplus plutonium. The White House, in its latest budget request, said the multibillion-dollar facility is over budget and unaffordable under projected spending plans.
The House would have none of it and, in its budget bill, provided $340 million for the MOX facility in fiscal 2017, which is exactly what the facility got in 2016. The House’s bill, released Tuesday, explicitly says money appropriated for MOX starting next fall “may be made available only for construction and program support activities.”
On the other hand, the Senate’s bill, which provides $270 million for MOX in fiscal 2017, contains no such legislative imperative. During the subcommittee markup on Wednesday, Alexander said he understood DOE’s concerns about the facility’s rising price tag, and that he would leave it to the Senate Armed Services Committee to decide whether the plant should indeed be closed — something Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), also present for the Wednesday markup, vowed once again to oppose.
The Senate Armed Services Committee had not scheduled a hearing about MOX at press time Friday.
