Plutonium pits, Cold War liquid waste and stricter policing of the contractor base are among the biggest management challenges for the Department of Energy in fiscal year 2021, the agency’s Inspector General wrote this week in the latest version of an annual report.
Pits are new on the Inspector General’s list this year, but liquid waste and contractor oversight are nigh-perennial features — although this year, the Inspector General went beyond calls to manage contracts more carefully and suggested that DOE could employ more people whose sole job it is to seek out untrustworthy contractors and bar them from doing business with the government.
DOE issued “only” five suspensions and 19 debarments to contractors in fiscal year 2019, the Inspector General wrote. The Defense Department, the only federal agency that does more contracting than DOE, racked up 267 suspensions and 442 debarments in the same period.
“These numbers are lower than one would expect from a Federal agency with the Department’s contracting presence,” the Inspector General wrote in the report. “Notably, within this same time period from 2018 through 2019, the [Inspector General] experienced an approximated 30 percent increase in the volume of criminal investigations being conducted within the Department’s contractor complex. Several of these investigations involve substantially larger alleged losses when compared to historic investigations. These are troubling trends.”
Meanwhile, the Inspector General again flagged DOE Environmental Management’s program to solidify and eventually dispose of millions of gallons of liquid, radioactive waste leftover from Cold War nuclear-weapon production.
The most ambitious of these, the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, is supposed to be fully operational by 2036, under the Tri-Party Agreement that governs Hanford cleanup.
However, “it is unlikely the Pretreatment and High-Level Waste facilities will be completed and in operation in time to meet current commitments,” the Inspector General wrote. “Currently, the Department is finalizing an Analysis of Alternatives on potential options for high-level tank waste treatment as efficiently as possible.”
This year, officials from DOE’s Hanford Site, the Washington state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency have held several sessions of what they describe as “holistic” talks on a wide range of cleanup issues and Tri-Party Agreement milestones at the former plutonium-production complex.
With regard to active nuclear weapons programs, the inspector general did not add much to the record about the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) early progress on setting up a pair of plutonium-pit factories, which are supposed to begin casting nuclear-weapon cores for future intercontinental ballistic missile warheads by 2024.
With an estimated life-cycle cost north of $30 billion through 2050 or so, the NNSA’s effort to build pit factories at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site is among the most closely watched programs in the entire department. Both pit plants are scheduled to have their Critical Decision 1 review in 2021. The Los Alamos plant is scheduled to start production in the middle of this decade, with the Savannah River Plant to follow by 2030.
The NNSA’s goal is 80 pits a year by 2030, though the agency has acknowledged it will be challenged to hit that target. With a Democratic administration headed to the White House, Democrats in Congress might again try to slow down the pit program, and the intercontinental ballistic missile program it feeds.
