The Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup branch would see its annual budget increase to nearly $8.3 billion, or $359 million than the $7.9 billion it received during fiscal 2022, under an omnibus 2023 spending bill released Tuesday and passed by the Senate Thursday.
It’s the same figure the Senate Appropriations Committee recommended this summer and an increase over the flat, $7.9-billion budget that the White House requested and the House approved this summer. The Senate voted 68-to-29 Thursday to adopt the full-year appropriations bill, which then went to the House for a Friday vote. The House had not voted at deadline for Weapons Complex Monitor, but it was expected to approve the bill, which President Joe Biden (D) said this week he would sign.
The largest account at DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, Defense Environmental Cleanup, would receive around $7 billion, or about $315 million more than what Congress approved for fiscal 2022. That’s more than $330 million above the request, after discounting the administration’s plan to fund certain uranium cleanups through Defense Environmental Cleanup — a plan Congress again rejected in the latest omnibus.
Defense Environmental Cleanup does not include every dollar spent on site operations, but it provides a snapshot of the state of core nuclear-weapons cleanup programs across the old weapons complex. For fiscal 2023, Congress approved more spending for each one of them than the White House sought, especially at Hanford, Idaho and the Savannah River Site.
Meanwhile, Non-Defense Environmental Cleanup spending would increase by nearly $25 million year-over-year to about $359 million. The account includes, among other things, the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York: a cleanup of a commercially operated spent fuel reprocessing demonstration.
The Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning fund would also grow, to $879 million or $19 million more than the prior year, according to the explanatory statement posted by House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). Congress declined again to go along with the White House’s plan to use Defense Environmental Cleanup money to make the fund whole and instead appropriated money directly into the fund.
Since 2017, the topline figure for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management has grown about 30%. The office got $6.4 billion six years ago.
Hanford funded well above White House’s request
The Hanford Site in Washington state, Environmental Management’s most costly cleanup property, would again get about a third of the total cleanup budget, under the omnibus.
The two operating offices at Hanford, Richland and the Office of River Protection, would together receive about $2.74 billion under the proposal, or $141 million more than last year’s combined $2.6 billion.
Hanford’s Office of River Protection will get more than $1.7 billion in the omnibus alone. Congress approved over $43 million more than requested. Unasked-for increases to the construction budget at the site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant account for most of the plus-up.
In the explanatory statement appended to the bill, lawmakers reminded DOE that startup of Direct Feed Low Activity Waste operations at the waste treatment plant must remain the agency’s “top focus” at Hanford.
DOE wants to start turning Hanford’s low-activity, radioactive tank waste into glass by the end of 2023, but a DOE budget official recently said the startup could slip into 2024. A legally binding federal consent decree also gives the agency until 2025 to start up the plant, mostly as a concession to time the agency said it lost during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Oak Ridge landfill, WIPP ventilation, Los Alamos cattle
Under the omnibus, most Cold War and Manhattan Project cleanup sites are slated for increases.
Defense Environmental spending at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina would grow to $1.65 billion, up from $1.59 billion in 2022 and more than $75 million above the request. A roughly $50 million increase for the site’s risk management operations budget drove most of that.
The Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee would receive $505 million in environmental funding in the bill, up nearly $19 million from the 2022 appropriation and about $18 million more than requested. The funding includes $35 million for development of a new on-site landfill that won final approval and is considered key to further demolition of Oak Ridge buildings contaminated with mercury. The waste disposal facility was funded at the requested $13 million in fiscal 2022.
The Idaho National Laboratory would receive $458 million in nuclear cleanup funds for the fiscal year, up from $443 million in fiscal 2022 and almost $80 million more than requested, thanks to a nearly $75-million boost to the cleanup and waste disposition account. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) is the ranking member of the appropriations subcommittee in charge of DOE’s annual spending bill.
The Nevada National Security Site is the rare property to get fewer Defense Environmental Cleanup dollars in fiscal 2023 than in 2022, under the omnibus. It would receive $63 million, in line with the request but down year-over-year from $76 million. DOE Environmental Management book keeps the site in its NNSA Sites and Nevada Offsites account.
In that same account, Congress decided to keep spending on the deactivation and decommissioning of excess facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California flat at about $35 million. The White House wanted to cut that by about $23 million, year-over-year.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico would receive $459 million in the bill: $15 million more than 2022’s appropriation and a little over $2.5 million more than requested. The deep-underground transuranic waste disposal site would receive the requested $59 million for the crucial Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System, designed to triple underground airflow by 2025 or so. The infrastructure project received $65 million in fiscal 2022.
Also in New Mexico, the Los Alamos National Laboratory would receive the requested $286 million in environmental funding for fiscal 2023, up from $275 million in fiscal 2022. There is also a separate line item funding about $41 million for decommissioning and eventual dismantling of contaminating excess facilities at the laboratory. That is up from $17 million in the 2022 budget, also as requested.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico executive director Jay Coghlan told Exchange Monitor he is happy to see the increase, although “it took a lawsuit by the New Mexico Environment Department to make it happen.”
While it is not an Environmental Management budget item, the explanatory statement prods the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration that manages the site to “to remove all unauthorized and unbranded cattle” between a couple of water canyons on the outskirts of Los Alamos property.
The cattle “pose health, safety, and environmental risks,” appropriators said, and lawmakers want the DOE agency to herd them up and head them out within 12 months.
