The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act would allow $100 million more in the primary funding tranche for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management than requested by the Donald Trump administration.
The legislation would authorize $5.1 billion for defense environmental cleanup for the fiscal year starting Oct. 1 at the 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project sites. All of that boost would go to cleanup of legacy waste at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, according to funding tables appended to the bill.
The White House budget request would cut cleanup funds for Los Alamos from $220 million for the current period to $120 million in fiscal 2021 – a proposal that has drawn the ire of New Mexico’s two senators, Democrats Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall. Heinrich is a member of the SASC. The Senate Armed Services’ NDAA would reinsert the $100 million under a line item to “execute achievable scope of work.”
In particular, the committee seems focused on continued containment measures directed at a mile-long chromium plume on the eastern boundary of the laboratory site. Chromium-contaminated water releases from a power plant’s cooling towers occurred from the mid-1950s until 1972. “The committee supports EM’s surface and groundwater management efforts at LANL as well as those focused on remediation of contaminated sites,” according to the Senate NDAA report.
The Senate committee released the text of the NDAA late Tuesday after approving the legislation earlier this month. The defense policy bill only sets spending caps, with the actual money set via appropriations legislation that has not yet been unveiled. A motion to proceed to floor debate and a vote by the full Senate is expected next week.
The House Armed Services Committee’s strategic forces subcommittee has released a 56-page mark for the NDAA but has not yet published any funding figures for the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s defense-related nuclear cleanup. The panel approved its section of the bill in a 15-minute markup Tuesday.
A House staffer said Friday the top-line funding for environmental defense spending could come in at about $5.7 billion. Details should come Monday when the HASC chairman’s mark is issued. That package should include text of the bill, a report, and tables on the funding legislation. An amendment session would soon follow.
The Senate panel’s overall defense environmental spending would still be far below the $6.25 billion included in that line item under the fiscal 2020 budget. Adding two other appropriations tranches, the Office of Environmental Management this year received $7.5 billion – $1 billion more than the White House requested. The administration in February asked for $6.1 billion in 2021 for DOE Environmental Management, an amount almost certain to be plused-up on Capitol Hill.
The upper chamber’s NDAA calls for more study into supplement treatment options for low-activity waste at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state. The Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel is scheduled to start converting low-activity material into a glass form by the end of 2023. But the facility lacks sufficient capacity to accommodate all the LAW, which comprises 90% of the 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste in Hanford tanks.
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, as well as the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, have been studying alternatives for the remainder – such as grouting the waste or building another vitrification plant. Additional research on the economic and technical feasibility of the supplemental LAW options should continue, according to the NDAA.
The studies to date have not actually recommend a technology option for the supplemental LAW at Hanford. The Senate panel wants the GAO report issued within two years of bill enactment.
The Senate committee also wants the GAO to continue monitoring cost, schedule, and related issues at the Hanford vitrification plant through 2023. The vitrification plant has a history of schedule delays and cost increases. In 2016, Bechtel increased the cost estimate for the WTP from $14.6 billion to $17 billion. In September 2019, the Hanford site mnager said WTP might not meet a 2036 deadline for full operations, handling both low-activity and high-activity waste.
The panel also wants the Office of Environmental Management to incorporate a GAO recommendation to provide Congress with ongoing environmental liability estimates at the 16 nuclear cleanup sites. That measure is also in the House NDAA. The GAO recently put the office’s environmental liability estimate at $377 billion.
House Armed Services Panel Seeks Study on DOE Nuclear Cleanup Leadership Turnover
A House Armed Services Committee panel is worried the top executive post at the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management is becoming too much of a revolving door.
The strategic forces subcommittee on Sunday released its 56-page mark for the House’s 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The document calls for the Government Accountability Office to examine the amount of turnover at the top of the DOE nuclear cleanup office.
The subcommittee believes “instability in its [EM’s] leadership and organization structure” has limited the office’s ability to remediate 16 Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear-weapon sites.
Since 1991, the Office of Environmental Management has had nine different assistant secretaries and nine acting assistant secretaries or senior advisers. In the past five years, the average length of service for the top boss has been one year, the subcommittee said in the document. In addition, EM has been placed under four different DOE undersecretaries in the past 15 years.
The lawmakers want a GAO analysis regarding the extent to which has the Energy Department has provided EM with “sufficient capacity and ensured leadership stability to carry out its mission.”
As part of the same study, the House panel wants the GAO to examine the key elements of EM’s mission and how it might have change since the office’s creation.
The comptroller general, who leads the GAO, is instructed to brief the House Armed Services Committee by Nov. 1, 2020, on preliminary findings.
A longtime federal manager, William (Ike) White has served as DOE senior adviser for environmental management since June 2019. He succeeded Anne Marie White, the last Senate-approved assistant secretary for environmental management, who resigned under pressure that month after only 14 months on the job. Anne White apparently displeased her boss, DOE Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar, with her handling of a probe into potential radioactive contamination at a middle school outside the department’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
ExchangeMonitor Reporter Dan Leone contributed to this article.
