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. The NDAA details released Tuesday indicate 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 overall defense environmental spending, however, would still be far below the $6.25 billion included in the line item under the fiscal 2020 budget. Including two other appropriations tranches, the Office of Environmental Management this year received $7.5 billion.
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.
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 Science, as well as the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, have been studying other 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.
