Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
1/30/2015
The lifecycle cost estimate for the Department of Energy’s cleanup mission at the Savannah River Site has been extended 23 years and increased in cost by $25.2 billion due to declining budgets and the lack of a national repository for spent fuel and high-level waste, DOE officials said this week. When compared with 2013 numbers, the 2014 estimate pushed cleanup completion from Fiscal Year 2042 to Fiscal Year 2065 and has an estimated range of between $91 billion and $109 billion with an 8.6 year schedule contingency, DOE Savannah River Missions Support Assistant Manager Doug Hintze said this week. He emphasized that the annual long-term estimate is based on assumptions that frequently change.
Since the previous plan was developed, DOE has stated that it aims to have a long-term national nuclear waste repository developed by 2048, while the shuttered Yucca Mountain project had been slated for completion decades earlier. That means that waste will likely have to stay at Savannah River long after cleanup is finished, keeping cleanup operations in place and increasing costs. Additionally, the site has been hit by budget cuts far below previous levels. “The funding drove out the program six-to-eight years. The remainder is due to the repository,” Hintze said this week. “We’ll be finished in the 2042 time frame and then we’ll go to basically babysitting the material on site for the last 20 years until we can dispose of it in a federal repository.”
Budgets began a decline at Savannah River several years ago, but it wasn’t until 2014 that it became clear that it was a long-term trend rather than a short dip. “After the last couple of years of not having the funding that we were expecting we created a bow wave of scope in the mid-2020s of scope,” Hintze said. “It looked like we were going to need funding of up to around $2.2 billion per year. We know our site budget has been receiving around $1.3 billion, expecting that sort of money was not going to be realistic. So we lowered our funding to be more consistent with what we get and the escalation factor associated with that. That’s what drove out most of the programs six-to-eight years.”
Site Doesn’t Expect Immediate Impacts From FY 2015 Funding Cut
Meanwhile, despite receiving less-than-expected funding for the remainder of this fiscal year, Savannah River does not expect to see any negative impacts this year due to changes in pension contribution regulations, DOE said this week. Overall funding for Savannah River cleanup was cut to $1.121 billion in the FY 2015 omnibus appropriations bill, compared to $1.150 billion in the Obama Administration’s request. “Although FY 2015 enacted funds are less than requested, SRS does not anticipate any negative impacts,” DOE Savannah River spokesman Jim Giusti said in a written response this week. “The required pension contributions for FY 2015 are less than what was originally budgeted, which will offset the difference between FY 2015 enacted and requested amounts.”
While most DOE cleanup sites saw a funding boost in the FY’15 spending bill, Savannah River saw one of the sharpest cuts. However, the site benefitted from changes in 2014 to the laws and regulations that set the Department’s required pension contributions. Those changes mean that the Department can set aside less money for pension contributions than it originally expected. Overall across the site, pension savings for Savannah River add up to about $70 million, meaning that the difference between the FY’15 request and the current funding level can be made up with those funds.
