As the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) seeks a larger-than-expected budget increase for 2021, another branch of the Department of Energy is seeking much less funding for cleanup of excess nuclear-weapon production sites
The Office of Environmental Management (EM) is requesting about $200 million for remediation at NNSA-owned facilities in the budget year beginning Oct. 1, down roughly 45% from some $365 million in 2020. The total budget proposed for EM is $6.1 billion.
The NNSA, meanwhile, wants $19.8 billion in 2021, up 20% from $16.7 billion in the 2020 appropriation.
Requested EM funding for cleanup of excess facilities at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California all but vanishes from the office’s spending plan. Environmental Management seeks about $1.8 million for these activities in 2021, down roughly 97% from the 2020 budget of more than $65 million, according to the detailed budget request EM released Monday morning.
It’s a case of 2020 funding being adequate for work planned during the next year. At Livermore this year, EM plans to finish demolition of Building 175, also called the MARS building. The facility was once used for an experimental uranium separation technique that featured a laser.
Also at Livermore in 2021, the cleanup office plans to begin demolition of the pool-type reactor in Building 280. Environmental Management will fund the demolition, but will attempt to begin work more quickly by first passing funds through an unspecified Army Corps Of Engineers contract and the Livermore site management contract held by Lawrence Livermore National Security, according to the detailed EM budget request.
Here are a few more tidbits from EM’s 2021 budget request that touch in some way on the NNSA:
- There is still no news about a follow-on site management contract at the Savannah River Site. The NNSA plans to build a massive production facility there to produce fissile nuclear weapon cores for W87-1 intercontinental ballistic missile warheads starting in 2030. The agency also harvests tritium for nuclear weapons at Savannah River Site. In its 2021 budget request, EM said a “follow-on acquisition” for SRS site management services “is currently in the acquisition-planning phase.” The office has options on the Fluor-led incumbent, Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, that could extend the current management pact to September 2022.
- The Environmental Management office cautioned that it needs funding to continue work on the underground ventilation system for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: the waste disposal facility near Carlsbad, N.M. Besides waste from shuttered Cold War weapons sites, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant will be the disposal site for transuranic waste created by the NNSA’s plutonium pit program, which seeks to sharply increase its output of fissile weapon cores starting in 2024 at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
