The Senate Appropriations Committee wants a report from the U.S. Energy Department on what it will take to decommission excess facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California over the next 10 years.
The panel said on Sept.12, in a report accompanying its version of the energy and water development bill, DOE should submit a plan for “decommissioning the full suite of excess facilities” at Livermore to the appropriations committees in the Senate and House of Representatives within six months after a final fiscal 2020 budget becomes law.
The report should identify the facilities due for decommissioning at Livermore and what it would take to clean them out. These are nonoperational facilities, along with other “higher-risk facilities” that will cease to operate in the next 10 years, an Energy Department source said in a Friday email.
In October 2018, DOE provided the appropriations and armed services committees in each chamber with a general plan for decommissioning nonoperating defense nuclear facilities.
As of January 2018, DOE had 1,611 excess facilities across its nuclear complex. Its rough estimate for decommissioning and demolition was $12.2 billion, not including waste disposal. The Office of Environmental Management at DOE owns 1,064 of the total excess facilities, with the other 547 divided between the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Office of Science, and the Office of Nuclear Energy.
The roughly 15% of the excess facilities that are high risk are expected to account for about 88% of the cost, according to the 2018 report. The document indicates both NNSA and the Office of Environmental Management own excess facilities at Livermore.
The fiscal 2018 budget included $100 million for decommissioning and teardown of the pool type reactor within Building 280 at Lawrence Livermore. The fiscal 2019 budget included $150 billion to decommission facilities at the lab not yet managed by the nuclear cleanup office.
