The Department of Energy made significant advances in nuclear security and nonproliferation operations during the eight years of the Obama administration, as well as in cleaning up the legacy of its Cold War nuclear weapons operations, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz said Thursday in his Cabinet Exit Memo.
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding “accelerated the cleanup of contaminated, often hazardous, legacy sites from the Cold War nuclear weapons production efforts, reducing overall costs to taxpayers while protecting the public and the environment,” according to Moniz. “During the Obama Administration, DOE reduced the cleanup footprint from 931 to 241 square miles and eliminated nearly six million square feet of contaminated facilities.”
Moniz is President Barack Obama’s second DOE chief, replacing Steven Chu in 2013. He has two weeks left on the job, with President-elect Donald Trump aiming to replace him with former Texas Gov. Rick Perry.
The memo lists a number of advances made by the DOE Office of Environmental Management during Obama’s two terms in office, including demolition of more than 500 disused facilities around the country, encompassing all remaining gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment process buildings at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee; the beginning of demolition at the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state; deactivation of over 220 buildings and structures at the Idaho National Laboratory; the beginning of operations at plants in Ohio and Kentucky that will convert roughly 700,000 tons of depleted uranium hexafluoride (DUF6) for final disposal; and the completion of the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
DOE EM, with an annual budget of about $6 billion, has completed remediation of 91 sites around the country, leaving 16 active locations.
The department’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration receives close to $13 billion annually – nearly half of DOE’s full yearly funding – for operations covering sustaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal and global nuclear nonproliferation.
“In 2009, the President set forth goals in Prague to secure vulnerable nuclear material and reduce the nation’s nuclear stockpile while maintaining our nation’s security. Over the past eight years we have continued to maintain a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent without nuclear explosive testing because of our innovative science-based stockpile stewardship program,” Moniz stated. “Together with international partners, we have completed removals or disposition of more than 4,000 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium from 16 countries plus Taiwan – more than enough material for 160 nuclear weapons.”
A number of areas will need continued attention from the next administration, according to Moniz. That list encompasses: continuing to invest in nuclear stockpile stewardship, weapons life extension, and the nuclear enterprise as a whole to ensure the deterrent remains viable without explosive nuclear testing; promoting ongoing reduction of U.S. nuclear weapons’ role in the national security strategy; and moving away from the mixed-oxide approach for disposition of surplus weapon-usable plutonium at Savannah River in favor of a dilution and disposal method that DOE says would save billions of dollars and years of work.
How Trump will approach the U.S. nuclear deterrent is one of the leading questions about the incoming president. During his campaign he suggested a willingness to have allied nations develop their own nuclear arsenals. Then, at the tail end of 2016, he tweeted that the United States must “greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.” Trump then reportedly followed that up by telling MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, “Let it be an arms race.”
The New York Times also reported on Dec. 27 that Perry could face pressure to end the United States’ informal moratorium on nuclear testing, initiated under President George H.W. Bush in the 1990s.
Moniz appeared to dismiss such concerns in his exit document.
“DOE will continue to maintain our remaining nuclear weapons without a return to nuclear explosive testing, carry out nuclear weapons life extension programs (which can facilitate future additional reductions in the stockpile), monitor and implement the Iran nuclear agreement and other nuclear security and nonproliferation agreements, continue to support the nuclear propulsion needs of the U.S. Navy, and advance the cleanup of contaminated legacy sites from the Cold War nuclear weapons program,” the MIT physicist wrote.
