The House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee on Wednesday approved a $16 million funding haircut for cleanup of the Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Tennessee.
If the spending level survives the congressional appropriations process, financing from the Energy Department’s Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund for the project would drop from about $195 million in the current budget to $179 million in the fiscal year starting Oct. 1. However, that would still be more than the $151 million the Energy Department requested in February.
The Oak Ridge plant housed uranium enrichment facilities during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War, leaving contaminated buildings, soil, sediment, and groundwater. Remediation began in 1997.
Cleanup work at the former uranium enrichment complex, now called the East Tennessee Technology Park, is winding down, as crews remediate the soil gaseous diffusion buildings once stood on and remove supporting facilities.
Contractor URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR) has been on the job since 2011, and expects to completely finish cleanup at the East Tennessee Technology Park in 2020.
The Oak Ridge funding is included in the House energy and water appropriations bill sent to the House floor on a 29-20 vote. The full chamber had not scheduled a vote on the legislation as of deadline Friday.
The Senate Appropriations Committee’s energy and water panel is expected to take up the energy and water bill Tuesday. Full Senate Appropriations could tackle it Thursday.
For site-wide environmental operations, Oak Ridge would receive $291 million in defense environmental spending, $179 million from the UED&D Fund, through the non-defense environmental line item would share part of a $101 million pot with similar facilities at Portsmouth, Ohio, and Paducah, Ky.
The House panel appropriated $122 million for cleaning up excess contaminated facilities at the Y-12 National Security Complex, about $6 million less than the enacted 2018 level. Excess facilities are funded through the defense environmental cleanup category.
About $15 million of that would be used to demolish Alpha-4, a mercury-contaminated nuclear facility once used for electromagnetic uranium separation. Another $10 million will allow the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) to demolish Building 9213, which was used for uranium storage and criticality experiments.
Construction of Y-12’s new mercury treatment facility would receive $21 million under the House bill, about $4 million more than the current appropriation. Preparatory work is already underway, but the construction contract has not yet been awarded. Once up and running, the facility will treat water in the East Fork Poplar Creek contaminated with mercury from the weapons plant’s Manhattan Project and Cold War era lithium separation activities. It will also keep mercury released from the soil during building demolition out of the waterways.
The House appropriated more than $52 million toward disposing of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s remaining uranium-233 inventory at Building 3019. OREM shipped about half of the highly enriched uranium to the Nevada National Security Site last year. The rest must be downblended before disposal.
Disposal of transuranic waste from heavy element research and isotope production would be cut by $4 million from this fiscal year’s enacted $71 million. Oak Ridge’s Transuranic Waste Processing Facility began shipping off waste last year to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, New N.M. The center expects to continue monthly shipments throughout 2018.
