By way of disclaimer, Wall Street gurus like to caution that past performance cannot predict future results.
Nevertheless, here are a few Exchange Monitor observations — let’s not call them predictions — about where things stand at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) as 2023 begins.
- Congressional funding for the Office of Environmental Management is stable for the rest of the fiscal year thanks to a pre-holiday budget deal, but the new budget of $8.3 billion does not, using the rough measure of the Department of Labor’s consumer price index, quite keep up with the rate of inflation. Major nuclear properties continue to have friends on the budget committees. Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), supporter of Hanford Site remediation, could become chair of Senate Appropriations, according to published reports. Likewise, House Appropriations Committee members such as Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho) and Rep. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.) can be counted upon to go to bat for the weapons complex.
- Big DOE EM contracts remain ripe for the picking and one of the biggest should be awarded soon, sources told the Monitor around the holidays. The potential $45-billion, 10-year Integrated Tank Disposition Contract at the Hanford Site at Richland, Wash., could be awarded any week now, a source said as recently as Thursday. The deal will combine management of the site’s underground tanks of liquid radioactive waste, now handled under contract by the Amentum-led Washington River Protection Solutions, with operation of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, which Bechtel National is building under a separate contract. The request for proposals for the follow-on deal hit the street about 15 months ago. Other big awards expected in 2023 include a follow-on cleanup contract at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio as well as depleted uranium hexafluoride conversion work at Portsmouth and the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
- Details should emerge on changing-of-the-landlords at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina Other than confirming the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will take over as landlord of Savannah River by 2025, few details have been shared publicly. That might change Feb. 2 when acting cleanup boss William (Ike) White and NNSA principal deputy administrator Frank Rose planned to address the Citizens for Nuclear Technology Awareness in Aiken, S.C.
- Ike White should continue to run the show on an acting basis at Environmental Management. Most folks who express an opinion to Exchange Monitor seem satisfied with White at the helm. The career fed has run the cleanup office on an acting basis since mid-2019. Many also believe EM flies below the political radar in President Joe Biden’s White House, making a Senate nomination for the assistant secretary of environmental management job a low priority.
- Speaking of personnel, EM recruitment efforts for a younger, more diverse workforce continue. While the cleanup office has roughly 1,200 employees, as of October it had only 15 that were age 30 or younger.
- It promises to be an eventful year at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M. A new prime, Bechtel National affiliate Salado Isolation Mining Contractors, was scheduled to take over from Amentum-led Nuclear Waste Partnership in early February. Also the New Mexico Environment Department is taking comments on a new 10-year permit renewal for the deep -underground transuranic waste disposal site. The state does not want the salt mine operating as late into the century as DOE might. And long before that, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality wants the last drums of stranded, potentially combustible transuranic waste moved from Waste Control Specialists to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
- Glass-making is getting closer to reality at Hanford. But while the Direct-Feed-Low-Activity Waste Facilities to vitrify low-level liquid tank waste are finished, plenty of potential startup problems loom at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant being built by Bechtel. An EM budget official recently acknowledged the startup could slip into 2024 rather than 2023. The agency also has legal permission to delay startup until 2025.
- COVID-19 is still around, albeit less deadly than before. As of this week, 71% of the U.S. population had been inoculated against the illness that has killed about 1.1 million Americans, according to the Johns Hopkins University online coronavirus tracker. Vaccination rates at DOE and its contractors are well above 90%, according to the agency. As of Thursday Jan. 5 the U.S. averaged around 470 deaths daily per week, or roughly one-fifth of the average a year ago. During mid-December about 45% of U.S. counties had medium-to-high rates of COVID transmission, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. DOE requires masking in areas with high community transmission rates.
- With much of the U.S. now emerged from the COVID paralysis, many pandemic-related lawsuits, including one brought by more than 300 workers at Hanford, continue to play out in the courts. In a separate COVID-related lawsuit, this one concerning the federal vaccine mandate broadly, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals dealt the Biden administration a setback this week, ruling that the White House overstepped its authority by using the procurement act to require contract vaccine mandates.
