Funding for a key environmental remediation infrastructure project at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee would be sliced by $27 million in the Department of Energy’s budget plan for fiscal 2020.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management request at Oak Ridge would decrease by $217 million from the fiscal 2019 level, from $646 million to about $429 million, if Congress signs off on the proposal.
Within that, funding planning and construction of the Outfall 200 Mercury Treatment Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex would drop from $76 million in the fiscal year ending Sept.30 to $49 million in the new fiscal year.
The Outfall 200 facility will remove mercury from Upper East Fork Poplar Creek. In December, a joint venture, APTIM-North Wind Construction, won a $92 million DOE contract to build the mercury treatment facility. The firm has done much site preparation work and should start full-scale construction early this summer on the anticipated $224 million project, which could be operational in 2022.
The budget proposal does increase planning and design money for Oak Ridge’s On-Site Waste Disposal Facility from $10 million to $15 million. The facility will take remediation debris from Y-12 and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory after the current landfill reaches its capacity in the early 2020s. The budget request places the total cost for the planned 2.2-million-cubic yard waste facility at $284 million.
The largest budget reduction at Oak Ridge would be for decontamination and decommissioning of nuclear facilities, which would drop by about half, from $189 million to $94 million. This could reflect a winding down of work under the current agreement held by AECOM-led URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), the prime cleanup contractor for the East Tennessee Technology Park and the Oak Ridge Reservation.
Remediation of the ETTP, formerly the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant complex, is expected to conclude next year. The current UCOR award, for nine years and about $2.7 billion, expires in July 2020. The next successor contract will focus more on other areas of the Oak Ridge Site; the Energy Department should issue a draft solicitation this spring.
Elsewhere, funding for Idaho National Laboratory cleanup would drop by almost $96 million, from roughly $443 million to about $348 million. The Idaho Cleanup Project is responsible for the treatment, storage, and disposition of various radioactive and hazardous wastes, including removal of targeted buried waste, as well as protection of the Snake River Plain Aquifer.
The fiscal 2020 budget calls for a $61 million reduction in liquid tank waste funding, from $163 million to $102 million. Solid waste stabilization funding would drop by $40 million, from $215 million to $175 million, in part due to the winding down of operations at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Plant (AMWTP).
The budget document said the Idaho cleanup request would support moving the AMWTP into cold standby in preparation for closure.
The AMWTP has processed most of the 65,000 cubic meters of on-site transuranic legacy waste at the national lab. The Energy Department announced in December it will close the facility this year. Less than 7,000 cubic meters of waste remain to be processed and shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico under a 1995 legal settlement between the state, DOE, and the U.S. Navy.
The Donald Trump administration this week rolled out its full fiscal 2020 budget justification for the Office of Environmental Management, which faces a roughly $700 million funding decrease from the current level.
Overall, funding for the cleanup office would drop from almost $7.2 billion in fiscal 2019 to about $6.5 billion proposed for the budget year that begins Oct. 1. Defense environmental cleanup funding would decline from just over $6 billion to $5.5 billion; non-defense environmental cleanup would go from $310 million to $247 million; and Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) money would go from $841 million to $715 million.
In Capitol Hill hearings this week to discuss DOE’s latest budget plan, Energy Secretary Rick Perry faced early pushback on the reduction in cleanup funding. That suggests, as in past years, Congress will add money to the department request. Last year the congress added about $600 million to the administration’s $6.6 billion budget request.
Among the funding asks other key cleanup sites:
- The two field offices at DOE’s largest and most complex Cold War remediation property, the Hanford Site in Washington state, would have their combined budgets slashed by roughly $416 million.
- Conversely, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina would enjoy a $91 million increase from roughly $1.55 billion to $1.64 billion, including a $47 million uptick in tank waste management funding.
- The Carlsbad Field Office in New Mexico, which oversees the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP), would take a $5 million haircut, from $403 million to $398 million.
- The budget for the Paducah Site in Kentucky would increase by nearly $3 million, from $274 million to almost $277 million.
- The Portsmouth Site in Ohio, however, would suffer a hit of about $50 million, dropping from $476 million to $426 million.
- Remediation funding for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California would rise about $103 million to almost $130 million.
- Funding at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico would drop by about $25 million, from $220 million to $195 million.
- Cleanup funding for the Nevada National Security Site would remain virtually flat at less than $61 million.
- The same holds true for the Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) in New York state at $15 million.
- Flat funding is also the case for the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York at $78 million.
