The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee will host a hearing today on Cold War nuclear cleanup without any witnesses from the Energy Department office that manages national remediation of that waste.
No one from DOE’s Office of Environmental Management is scheduled to testify at the hearing, according to the witness list on the committee’s website. Representatives of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corps of Engineers will appear, as will officials from two state governments and the Afognak Native Corp. of Anchorage, Alaska, the website says.
A committee aid said DOE was not invited to the hearing.
“We invited EPA – which oversees DOE’s cleanups to make sure they comply with CERCLA,” a committee aide said by email. CERCLA is the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act: the 1980 federal law that governs so-called EPA Superfund sites contaminated with hazardous waste.
The hearing will stream live on the web at 10 a.m. Eastern time.
DOE’s roughly $6-billion-a-year Office of Environmental Management, established in 1989, manages cleanup of former nuclear weapons sites that manufactured weapons and fissile material for the Pentagon’s arms race with the former Soviet Union. The Trump administration this month recommended increasing the EM budget by about $500 million for fiscal 2018.
