The Energy Department Office of Environmental Management should focus more on “breakthrough technologies” in nuclear cleanup operations, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine said this week.
Such technologies could cut the time needed for environmental remediation jobs, the National Academies said in a report Monday. The DOE Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) should manage the technology effort, according to the report, which identified seven areas to explore. They range from better modeling of data to pursuit of bulk-scale waste chemistry advances to improve treatment and disposal.
The report recommends Environmental Management implement a process to identify, prioritize, and deploy new information and technologies to address its cleanup problems.
The office’s approach to science and technology is currently “ad hoc and uncoordinated,” the National Academies said. Contractors make most decisions on what science and technology to use, with little coordination across the weapons complex.
The “headquarters managed” technology funding is a small part of DOE’s environmental remediation budget. It peaked at around 5 percent (about $300 million) of the annual EM budget in the 1990s through early 2000s, when the focus was on the characterization of affected soils and water of contaminated properties, along with controlling contamination. The funding dipped to $35 million in fiscal 2018 and $25 million in fiscal 2019 – both well below 1 percent of the total office funding.
Environmental Management’s cleanup budget should lean toward “finding breakthrough solutions and technologies that have the potential to substantially reduce cleanup lifecycle costs and schedules,” according to the report.
The Office of Environmental Management was founded in 1989 and cleaned up 91 sites over 30 years at a cost of about $170 billion. But the Energy Department expects EM will spend at least another 50 years and $377 billion to finish the other 16. Generally speaking, tank waste remediation and facility decontamination and demolition (D&D) are the costliest remaining chores.
The report suggests the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could conduct an independent assessment of the cleanup program’s life-cycle costs.
