With both chambers of Congress having now given their blessing to fiscal 2019 spending packages that provide in the neighborhood of $7 billion for Department of Energy nuclear cleanup operations, it is now up to a House-Senate conference committee to decide the exact amount.
The conference committee had not been scheduled to start its work as of deadline Friday, although the House has already picked its representatives. The House conferees will include Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), who represents the area around DOE’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee, and Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho), chairman of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee and a strong backer of the Idaho National Laboratory.
The Senate had not selected its conferees as of deadline on Friday. Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), who chairs the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee, has indicated he would like to move quickly to conference on the spending bills.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management would continue to enjoy a hefty budget under the Senate “minibus” appropriation package for fiscal 2019 passed in an 86-5 vote Monday evening.
The Senate bill, which covers funding for energy and water development programs, among others, would provide $7.2 billion in total funding for the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management. That is $300 million higher than the $6.9 billion the House offered in passing its own minibus on June 8.
The Environmental Management office is funded at $7 billion for the current fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. It manages environmental remediation at 16 World War II and Cold War-era nuclear weapons facilities around the country.
The Senate package provides $1.573 billion for the Office of River Protection at the Hanford Site in Washington state, while Hanford’s Richland Operations Office would get $838.17 million. The Office of River Protection oversees management of 56 million gallons of radioactive waste at the former plutonium production complex, while the Richland Operations Office heads the remainder of cleanup projects at the site. The House bill would set Hanford ORP and Richland spending levels at $1.48 billion and $863 million, respectively, covering both defense and non-defense environmental cleanup.
The House legislation would provide $433 million for cleanup at the Idaho National Laboratory, 24 percent more than the $349 million in the Senate version. The Savannah River Site in South Carolina would be funded at $1.4 billion by the Senate, incrementally more than the $1.38 billion in the House bill. Both the House and Senate packages would set funding for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico at $397 million.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) said this week he helped raise the budget for the Portsmouth Site in Ohio by $30 million above fiscal 2018 levels to compensate for the loss of revenue after the Energy Department suspended its “barter” of excess uranium. The uranium barter money had helped offset cleanup costs at the former gaseous diffusion plant.
The Senate package includes $366.9 million for decontamination and decommissioning of the Portsmouth plant and $41 million for a much-debated on-site radioactive waste disposal cell, for a total of about $408 million. The House version proposal was slightly higher at $414 million for Portsmouth. The House version also provides $41 million for the disposal cell.
The House would fund EM operations at the Paducah Site in Kentucky at roughly $223 million, about 9 percent more than the $206 million included in the Senate package for decontamination and decommissioning.
In addition to the decontamination line item, both the House and Senate would divide between $101 million (House) and $102 million (Senate) in non-defense environmental spending for gaseous diffusion plant sites in Portsmouth, Paducah, and Oak Ridge, Tenn.
