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 made the request on Sept. 12 in a report accompanying its version of the $49-billion energy and water development bill for fiscal 2020. It wants DOE to 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 House has already passed its version of the energy and water bill, which includes $7.2 billion for the Office of Environmental Management, about level with last year’s budget. The full Senate has yet to vote on its corresponding legislation, which would fund nuclear cleanup at more than $7.4 billion. The Energy Department and other federal agencies are now operating under a stopgap continuing resolution that runs into late November.
The report to Congress 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 at 16 nuclear cleanup sites around the nation, with the other 547 divided between the agency’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Office of Science, and the Office of Nuclear Energy. It appears from the 2018 plan there are only a handful at Livermore.
The offices that currently own the old facilities remains responsible for keeping them in safe condition until they are transferred to the Environmental Management office. Of the 1,611 excess facilities, 244 are considered higher risk because of their level of contamination.
The roughly 15% of the excess facilities designated high risk are expected to account for about 88% of the cleanup cost, according to the department’s 2018 plan for excess facilities. The document indicates both the NNSA and the Office of Environmental Management own excess facilities at Livermore.
The Savannah River Site in South Carolina has the highest number of old nonoperational facilities owned by the nuclear cleanup office, with 341. It is followed by 296 at Oak Ridge in Tennessee (with figures including the East Tennessee Technology Park, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Y-12 National Security Complex). There are 288 excess facilities at the Hanford Site in Washington State. In addition, the 2018 planning document lists 53 at the Paducah Site in Kentucky, 41 at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, 18 at the Energy Technology Engineering Center in California, 13 at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York, and 14 at “other” sites.
The Energy Department updates its excess facilities inventory and planning every two years, a process that started in 2016. The Office of Environmental Management has completed decommissioning about 3,000 excess buildings, trailers, and other structures over the past 25 years, according to the 2018 report.
The fiscal 2018 budget approved by Congress included $100 million for decommissioning and teardown of the pool type reactor within Building 280 at Lawrence Livermore, which operated largely for research purposes from 1958 until 1980. The fiscal 2019 budget approved $150 million to decommission facilities at the lab not yet managed by the nuclear cleanup office. The Energy Department requested $128 million for fiscal 2020.
