The U.S. Department of Energy’s record of policing itself is “mixed at best,” and the agency might benefit from independent oversight by an entity such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.) said Tuesday.
Pallone made his remarks during a House Energy and Commerce energy subcommittee hearing on U.S. nuclear infrastructure.
“For example, the [DOE] Environmental Management program in recent years has been plagued by high-profile leaks of radioactive waste, contractor problems, missed deadlines and escalating cleanup costs,” Pallone said.
The department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) has spent $35 billion in the last six years to clean up nuclear and hazardous wastes at Cold War nuclear sites, Pallone said: “Yet, environmental liability grew over the same time period by over $90 billion.”
Pallone was evidently referring to data from the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s 2017 report on “High Risk” projects.
The lawmaker also cited a 2014 report, from the Congressional Advisory Panel on the Governance of the Nuclear Security Enterprise, which found DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration lacked a strong plan for modernizing and upgrading its national security mission.
The 2014 report said the NNSA had lost credibility in its capacity to deliver needed facilities on time and on budget. The report also said the current NNSA governance model of semiautonomy is fundamentally flawed because the agency’s administration is not provided true autonomy from DOE headquarters.
“The Administrator of NNSA is not provided the autonomy from DOE headquarters staffs necessary to accomplish the mission, nor has this governance model created a sense of accountability for mission accomplishment within the involved DOE headquarters staffs,” the 2014 report said.
Introducing an outside regulator might improve things, Pallone said: “This is an idea that the Subcommittee on Energy has explored on a bipartisan basis in the past and it may be time to do so again.”
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is primarily the regulator for commercial nuclear power and nuclear waste operations in the United States.
Pallone’s remarks didn’t draw any immediate comments from his colleagues on the subcommittee or a panel of witnesses, which included senior officials from the Office of Environmental Management, NNSA, and NRC.
The New Jersey Democrat’s office did not return a call or emails asking if the lawmaker plans to draft any legislation to assign DOE an outside regulator.
In a separate exchange, Rep. John Shimkus (R-Ill.) pressed Principal Deputy Assistant Energy Secretary for Environmental Management James Owendoff about DOE’s “uranium barter” program, in which department trades excess government uranium to help underwrite the cost of cleanup at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Ohio. Shimkus said the practice hurts the nuclear fuel cycle industry in the United States.
Critics say putting excess uranium on the market further depresses the already-anemic domestic uranium production industry.
Shimkus asked Owendoff if the Office of Environmental Management had sought to discontinue the uranium barter program in favor of full appropriations. Owendoff responded that the program has been reduced significantly, from 1,600 metric tons to 1,200 metric tons as of May 2017.
“You are diminishing it,” Shimkus said.
“I believe we have done that,” Owendoff replied. Shimkus then broke in again to invite Owendoff to discuss the matter at another time.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) has placed a hold on the nomination of Anne Marie White to become assistant secretary of energy for environmental management, until DOE promises to discontinue its uranium barter program.
At one point, the committee’s senior Democrat, Rep. Bobby Rush (Ill.), challenged Owendoff on EM’s history of missed deadlines and escalating costs at many cleanup sites, which has been pointed out by the Government Accountability Office over the years. “This is a challenging business, sir,” Owendoff replied.
It sometime involves using first-of-a-kind technology to address the highest-risk areas, such as the vitrification plant being built to treat up to 56 million gallons of radioactive waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state, he said.
Despite the technical complexity encountered in such cleanup, EM has shown it can achieve measurable results, such as the completed environmental remediation of the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production site in Colorado, according to Owendoff.
