The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) would wind up with an annualized budget of $6.4 billion for fiscal 2017, about 3 percent more than last year, if an omnibus spending bill unveiled Monday becomes law.
The proposed budget, which is expected to pass Congress, gives the Environmental Management office about 5 percent more, on an annualized basis, than what the Barack Obama administration requested in 2016 for the current budget year. The Department of Energy in total would receive $31 billion.
A detailed list of the puts and takes at EM can be found on the ExchangeMonitor’s budget tracker.
Congress must pass the bill for President Donald Trump to sign before the federal government runs out of money on Friday. The House was not scheduled to vote on its rules of debate for the measure until Tuesday.
The new spending package would raise the budget for cleanup at the Portsmouth Site in Piketon, Ohio, by almost 40 percent to some $315 million. That includes nearly doubling funding for on-site waste disposal facility where, beginning next decade, DOE plans to bury waste from decontamination and decommissioning of Portsmouth’s former uranium enrichment plant.
The bill also would jump-start construction of the new underground ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, N.M., by more than tripling funding to $30 million for a new exhaust shaft.
Also as expected, the omnibus ditches the Obama administration’s plan to fund uranium cleanup at the Oak Ridge, Paducah, and Portsmouth sites by tapping into a moribund operations fund for the former United States Enrichment Corp. and reinstituting a tax on nuclear power.
Among the 10 major cleanup sites large enough to get their own budget lines in DOE’s annual funding bill, three would receive cuts relative to 2016 spending under the omnibus bill: The Richlands Operations Office at the Hanford’s Site in Washington state; WIPP, the only deep underground disposal site for transuranic waste; and the Idaho National Laboratory, which has the biggest transuranic waste backlog in the DOE weapons complex.
The Obama administration had proposed increases for all of these sites in 2017.
