President Donald Trump’s defense-heavy budget request would have mixed effects at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee.
Trump has made no secret of his desire to increase military-related spending. Toward that, the White House proposal for fiscal 2019 would provide $15.1 million for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration, the Department of Energy’s stockpile steward, up from the current funding of about $13 billion.
That would nearly represent half of the total DOE budget for the budget year beginning Oct. 1, with the boost almost entirely going to the NNSA’s Weapons Activities account.
One of the weapons activities it funds is production of replacement parts at the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge for the 30-year-old W88 nuclear warhead, which is carried on the Trident II (D5) submarine-launched ballistic missile.
An even $3 billion within the NNSA Weapons Activities account would go toward infrastructure and operations, paying for the construction of the Uranium Processing Facility at Y-12 and other facilities around the NNSA complex. Budget documents released this week do not specify how much money the UPF would get.
The outlook for Oak Ridge environmental remediation is less certain. The president’s budget request authorizes $182 million more in fiscal 2019 than in fiscal 2017 for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, which oversees cleanup of active and retired nuclear-weapon sites around the country. However, cleanup at Oak Ridge would be cut by $90 million, to $409 million.
“The decrease from the FY 2017 Enacted level is attributed to the completion of Building K-27 demolition and waste disposal activities and the decontamination and decommissioning of the remaining facilities in the East Tennessee Technology Park; as well as completing the Y-12 Colex West side equipment removal,” DOE said in its Budget in Brief document.
Money for the three ongoing cleanup projects in Oak Ridge comes from different funds.
Work at the former Oak Ridge Gaseous Diffusion Plant, now known at the East Tennessee Technology Park, is funded via the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund that provided $213.5 million for the remediation project in fiscal 2017.
The Energy Department’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) uses funds from a non-defense account to fulfill historic preservation requirements at the site. Those activities were funded at $6 million last year.
Work at Y-12 and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory comes out of a defense environmental fund, which provided $278.8 million in the last fiscal year.
The Energy Department has not yet released the full budget justification for its budget proposal, so it’s unclear how the $90 million cut will affect each account, but a DOE spokesman said OREM plans its work to requested levels, so cleanup efforts would continue in the face of any budget reductions.
URS-CH2M Oak Ridge (UCOR), DOE’s cleanup contractor for the ETTP, plans to complete its work within the next two years. As the project wraps up, OREM will transition its resources to Y-12, where a Mercury Treatment Facility is being built.
Congress has yet to pass a full budget for the current 2018 fiscal year, relying instead on five short-term measures to keep the federal government operating. That makes it somewhat difficult to forecast how it will approach the White House budget request, though the president’s energy proposal echoes the House of Representatives’ appropriation for fiscal 2018.
Legislators have not been shy about making clear that they ultimately set the funding levels for federal agencies.
“The President may suggest a budget, but, under the Constitution, Congress sets spending priorities and passes appropriations bills,” Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said, adding that he intends to carefully consider the document. “But my priorities will continue to be making sure our national defense, national laboratories, the National Institutes of Health and national parks have the resources they need,” he said.
