Energy Secretary Rick Perry suggested Tuesday he is ready to again suspend his agency’s past practice of bartering excess government uranium to help pay for environmental remediation at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
“I agree with you,” Perry told Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a vocal opponent of the practice, during a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the Energy Department’s fiscal 2020 budget request.
“Can you again commit to suspending the department’s uranium barters?” Barrasso asked.
“I think I have used the term ‘it’s a poor way to run a railroad’,” Perry said. “I still agree with you the Congress needs to directly appropriate the money for Portsmouth and get out of the barter business.”
The Atomic Energy Act of 1954, as amended by the USEC Privatization Act, stipulates DOE’s sales and transfers of uranium are subject to certain conditions, the Government Accountability Office said in a 2017 report. For example, the agency must determine that sales or transfers of uranium will not undermine the domestic uranium market.
The latest DOE budget request would cut the annual Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning (UED&D) Fund outlay for Portsmouth cleanup from $408 million in fiscal 2019 to roughly $356 million starting Oct. 1. The cut would be “offset by the resumption of uranium transfers (barter),” according to the budget justification for the department’s Office of Environmental Management.
A House-Senate Appropriations conference committee stipulated there would be no uranium barter in fiscal 2019 and provided extra funds to make up for the suspension. Portsmouth’s appropriation would drop from $476 million in the current budget to $426 million in fiscal 2020, under the request.
The barter practice has “contributed to record-low uranium prices” – putting uranium miners out of work in Wyoming and elsewhere, Barrasso said. Wyoming remains a major domestic producer of uranium, although the state industry is smaller than it used to be.
Also, during Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) expressed concerns about the potential for the Environmental Management office to revise its interpretation of high-level radioactive waste, “which is the worst stuff,” by “calling it something less hazardous.”
In October 2018, DOE proposed to reinterpret its definition of high-level waste to focus more on its radiological traits and less on its source of origin.
Most of the estimated 90 million gallons of HLW left over from federal nuclear weapons operations is stored at the Hanford Site in Washington state, neighboring Wyden’s state, along with the Idaho National Laboratory, the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York state, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The Energy Department and supporters of the reinterpretation say much waste is now treated as HLW although it shares radiological traits with less hazardous material, such as transuranic waste, which already has a disposal site. The Energy Department said in March it is still reviewing all the public comments it received and has not determined what action might happen next.
Citing the high-level waste at Hanford, Wyden has previously said the agency should not engage in ““lowering the bar for level of protection of future generations and the environment.”
Perry did not reply to Wyden’s comment during the hearing.
Like Wyden, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) bemoaned the proposed budget cuts for the two field offices at the Hanford Site. At the same time, “Unlike some of my colleagues, I am not here with an emphatic voice … I know in the end we [Congress] will prevail” on the appropriations, she added.
Hanford’s Richland Office would see its budget slashed from $954 million in fiscal 2019 to $718 million in fiscal 2020. The Hanford Office of River Protection would be cut from $1.57 billion currently to less than $1.4 billion in the new fiscal year, under the administration request.
The budget request seeks roughly $6.5 billion for the DOE Cold War remediation, down from about $7.2 billion in fiscal 2019.
