Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
10/10/2014
While new technologies could potentially reduce the Department of Energy’s cleanup costs by billions, given flat budgets and pressing milestone commitments, securing enough technology development funding is a major challenge, officials said this week at a Secretary of Energy Advisory Board task force meeting. The panel convened to discuss technology development for environmental management, which DOE officials said could make great strides with sufficient funding. But the panel members questioned how DOE planned to make the case for more tech money. “How do you make a convincing argument that we do know what we’re doing and we know that we haven’t been investing enough for it to pay off in the future? How can the labs help make that argument?” asked task force member Thomas Hunter, former director of Sandia National Laboratories, noting that “success in the past has been mixed.”
DOE has not always done a great job of promoting its successes in technology development, but the effort is critical to reduce the current $200 billion price tag for completion of DOE’s cleanup program, Savannah River National Laboratory Associate Director Jeff Griffin replied. “That is a national cost. If it stretches out it it’s going to be even more,” he said, adding, “The only way we are going to be able to bring that cost down is by doing things that are game changing that are shortening the mission. Right now we are spending more and more of a fixed budget on maintenance just to preserve where we are.” Ideally DOE would set up a new program focusing on breakthrough technologies with an annual budget of $50 million to $100 million, Griffin said, though a budget as low as $10 million would make a difference.
‘Pressures of Compliance’ Drive Budget
The “pressures of compliance” on regulatory commitments with states containing cleanup sites are driving the budget now, DOE Office of Environmental Management Deputy Assistant Secretary for Site Restoration Mark Gilbertson said. “When the program was baselined and we established these kinds of arrangement agreements with the regulators we were planning on a $6 billion per year program. At our profile we are at $5.6 billion now. That kind of reduction in funding, plus if you look at having to take on the transfer of the facility from USEC to the Department at Paducah, when you take on the issues of the new directions that are happening with regard to [the Waste Treatment Plant] and other large construction contracts, it puts pressure on the budget and you get into a situation where you are tackling the near term and everything is being starved,” he said.
Improving the efficiency of waste processing and working on waste forms has potentially huge rewards, Gilbertson said, citing the Next Generation Solvent as an example. The new solvent is anticipated to significantly increase waste processing rates at the Savannah River Site, though it has not yet been implemented to increase throughput.
DOE Could ‘Build the Case’ For Regulator Accommodations
With pressure from state regulators is driving budgets now, conversations with stakeholders about a change in approach could help gain support for more technology development, some panel members suggested. “All of a sudden going in and convincing all the courts to walk away from consent agreements, that’s impossible,” Task Force Chair Dick Meserve said, noting, however that states will likely be open to accommodations for DOE. “So you need to build the case for what the accommodation is, and ideally you’d make the case for spending some money early on toward developing technologies convincingly and be true to your word.”
EM to ‘Leverage’ Work at Other Entities
Meanwhile, with limited budgets EM is looking to leverage work going on at the national labs as well as in other entities, such as the Defense Department, robotics work in Japan and cleanup technologies being used at the U.K.’s Sellafield site, Gilbertson said. “It’s a different kind of model. We aren’t doing the competitive calls. We are not of buying down the risk by investing in the development of new technologies,” he said. “We are playing more a role in trying to leverage investments that others are making to try and make a difference within our program.”
Increasing an emphasis on technology development for cleanup should be a DOE-wide effort, panel member Gerald Boyd of SM Stoller said. “It seems our report ought to encourage the corporate DOE to grapple with this, not just put the burden on EM and say EM you have got to go fix this,” he said, noting that the Secretary’s Advisory Board was specifically tasked with addressing the matter. “We haven’t had a DOE Secretary ask for this in any time that I remember. It’s an opportunity for us to encourage everyone in DOE to wrap their arms around EM and figure out the right message to solve this problem.”
‘The Key is to Build Confidence’
The issue is a “classic government problem,” Idaho National Laboratory Director John Grossenbacher said. “You don’t put enough money into advance planning and you’re surprised it doesn’t turn out well. You don’t put enough money in to complete the design, so we wind up with concurrent design build and it’s a disaster. It shows up all over the government. So fundamentally, this is not new. The key is to build confidence,” he said, adding, “You can create a success. Now, look this worked. We want to take it to the next step. And you’ve got to build it over time, but it’s very difficult to do.”
