The White House this week requested a roughly 5.5% budget cut for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy for fiscal year 2025.
The office, which handles the agency’s civilian nuclear energy and waste programs, would get just under $1.7 billion for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, down about $94 million compared with the 2024 appropriation signed into law late last week.
Much of the decrease is within the advanced reactors demonstration program, which if the request became law would fall more than 30% to about $218 million in 2025, compared with $316 million or so in 2024. In 2024, appropriators provided that part of the Nuclear Energy office with more funding than it requested.
Funding for the office’s Integrated Waste Management Program, a key bucket of waste funding within DOE, would fall only slightly to about $53 million from $55 million in 2024, according to the latest budget request.
Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm was scheduled to testify before Congress next week about DOE’s 2025 budget request, but detailed hearings on the Office of Nuclear Energy’s portion of the request had not been scheduled at deadline Friday for RadWaste Monitor.
Granholm was scheduled to face the House Appropriations energy and water development subcommittee on Wednesday. The hearing was to be steamed online via YouTube.
