Staff Reports
WC Monitor
7/31/2015
The state of Tennessee has raised concerns about the Department of Energy’s future cleanup funding for the Oak Ridge Reservation and says if things don’t change it may be forced to take actions – such as installing more legally enforceable milestones – to get the cleanup done in a timely fashion.
Robert Martineau, commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, expressed the concerns in a May 5 letter to Mark Whitney, DOE’s acting assistant secretary for environmental management (and former DOE cleanup chief in Oak Ridge).
Tennessee, perhaps more than other states, has a reputation for cooperating and collaborating with DOE on cleanup schedules to address complicated technical issues associated with environmental projects, as well as the potential for budget shortfalls in the federal budget process.
Martineau’s letter outlined some of the past actions in which the state had compromised to help meet DOE needs and push forward to completing Oak Ridge cleanup around 2046. In April 2014, TDEC agreed to “milestone adjustments” that included the removal of some milestones related to transuranic waste, he wrote.
“TDEC expected that the FY 2016 funds originally targeted to the transuranic project would be reallocated to other high priority projects on the (Oak Ridge Reservation) rather than moved to other DOE sites,” Martineau wrote in the letter to Whitney. “However, it appears to have led to a 15 percent reduction of the DOE EM FY 2016 budget request for the ORR while the DOE EM budget request for the nation is reduced by less than 1 percent.”
He said the state now understands that future federal cleanup funding will be based on the fiscal 2016 level of $365 million for Oak Ridge, and he indicated that was not satisfactory.
“This is contrary to our understanding that the budget request would return to the $421 million threshold and that future compliance schedules would not be jeopardized,” Martineau wrote.
The Tennessee commissioner said it appeared the state’s willing to help DOE on various issues had resulted not only in a reduction in funding for 2016 but for years beyond that for the “foreseeable future.”
Martineau reminded DOE that Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam had previously told then-Energy Secretary Stephen Chu that the state was willing to do its “fair share” to accommodate budget cuts and funding shortfalls. But Martineau said the DOE funding request for Oak Ridge in 2016 was not equitable. If allowed to continue, he said, it would become even more inequitable.
“If the DOE EM budget request for FY 2017 does not restore adequate funding to assure compliance with the FFA long term, TDEC may seek to increase the number of enforceable milestones or take other measures to assure an acceptable level of funding necessary for the timely completion of the cleanup for the ORR,” he wrote to Whitney.
