President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team wants to know how much money the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management needs for its national nuclear cleanup program, and what the office’s staffing priorities are in the coming year.
“What is the right level of funding for EM to make meaningful progress across the complex and meet milestone and regulatory requirements?” the transition team asked in a memo first obtained and reported on Friday by Bloomberg and later released by The New York Times. “What program milestones will be reached in each of the four next years?”
Trump also put DOE under the gun with specific questions about cleanup programs at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.; the Paducah Site near Paducah, Ky.; and the Portsmouth Site in Pike County, Ohio.
Hanford got perhaps the sternest glare from transition aides, who directed DOE to describe “alternatives to the ever-increasing cost and schedule” for the Waste Treatment Plant that Bechtel National is building to turn the former plutonium production site’s 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste into more easily storable glass cylinders.
Bechtel’s Waste Treatment Plant contract, awarded in 2000 and modified since, is worth more than $11 billion. The cost is expected to rise as part of DOE’s effort to begin treating Hanford’s less-radioactive liquid waste in 2022. The plant has to be online and treating all Hanford waste by 2036, a federal judge ruled in March.
Bechtel National did not immediately reply to a request for comment Monday.
Trump transition aides also asked DOE if there are “plans to add staff to EM,” and if so, what the agency’s “staffing priorities” are for the roughly $6-billion-a-year Cold War cleanup office. The office now employs about 1,400 civil servants nationwide, including roughly 160 at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C., and about 110 in Germantown, Md., some 30 miles northwest of the Capitol.
Kristen Ellis, acting director of communications for EM, did not reply to a request for comment Monday.
Trump transition officials further asked DOE “what is the plan” to pay for cleanup of the former uranium enrichment facilities at Portsmouth and Paducah, once the government runs out of uranium to barter for cleanup services. Uranium barter covers much of the cost of cleanup at Portsmouth and Paducah, with the remainder coming out of DOE’s annual appropriation from Congress. Contractors that agree to uranium barter arrangement may not take short positions in commodities markets and so are at the mercy of uranium spot prices, which have steadily declined since 2007.
