The Department of Energy could spend $20 million on tearing down contaminated old facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California during fiscal 2024, or about $15 million less than what Congress approved for that purpose in fiscal 2023, according to the White House budget justification out last week.
The DOE Office of Environmental Managed started its excess facilities decommissioning work at the laboratory, run by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in 2018, according to the document. The overall DOE budget request from the Joe Biden White House, including Environmental Management and NNSA, will be the subject of a House Appropriations Committee hearing scheduled for Thursday.
In August and September of this year, work crews are expected to start taking down Livermore Buildings 280 and 281 respectively, according to the request. The buildings were part of the structures for the Pool Type Reactor complex, a neutron-producing machine used for research. The reactor itself has already been removed.
The removal of other building slabs and soils at the one-mile-square laboratory, about 45 miles inland of San Francisco, is scheduled for fiscal 2024, according to the budget justification.
The DOE cleanup office is teaming up with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to accomplish the Building 280 project, according to the justification. The lab’s nuclear remediation that does not involve high-risk excess facilities is typically done by Bechtel-led prime Lawrence Livermore National Security and its subcontractors.
Environmental Management’s non-excess facility budget for Livermore is more than $1.87 million roughly flat from last year’s $1.84 million. The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is the younger of DOE’s nuclear weapons design laboratories and the home of the agency’s largest non-explosive, high-energy nuclear-weapons test laboratory, the National Ignition Facility.
