AT DOE
As part of a broader effort to make a dent in a roughly $20-billion shortfall for uranium cleanup, the White House in its fiscal 2017 budget plan proposed tapping into a $1.6 billion fund that has been gathering dust since 1996.
The three-year drawdown of the United States Enrichment Corp. (USEC) Fund would begin in the next budget with a $674 million withdrawal to pay for decommissioning and demolition projects at Energy Department sites in Oak Ridge, Tenn., Paducah, Ky., and Portsmouth, Ohio, according to the 2017 DOE budget request the White House unveiled Tuesday.
That is roughly the same level of funding Congress approved for the work in 2016 as part of the $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill signed in December. Currently, cleanup at the three former uranium enrichment sites is paid for through the Uranium Enrichment Decommissioning and Demolition (UED&D) Fund. That DOE-managed fund faces a more than $20 billion shortfall and, at the current rate of spending, would run dry in 2020, some two decades before DOE thinks it can finish remediation at the three sites.
The USEC fund was created in 1992 to pay for operating expenses at the government-run uranium enrichment company privatized in 1996 and now known as Centrus Energy. The fund has sat in the U.S. Treasury for the past 20 years. In a 2015 floor speech, Sen Dan Coats (R-Ind.) dubbed the money pot a “zombie fund.”
Including USEC, UED&D, and a third fund called the Uranium Supply and Enrichment Account, DOE has about $5 billion it could use to narrow its looming uranium cleanup shortfall, Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said in a Tuesday press briefing at DOE headquarters in Washington.
However, only UED&D money may legally be spent on uranium cleanup. Getting access to all $5 billion would require new authorizing legislation from Congress. Likewise, lawmakers would have to approve a perennial DOE proposal, which the agency made again in the new budget, to reauthorize new government and industry contributions to the UED&D fund. Industry has opposed making new contributions.
“That will be a discussion,” Moniz told reporters.
Representatives the deep borehole nuclear waste storage demonstration project in North Dakota will host an informational meeting on the controversial plan on Feb. 15 in the city of Rugby.
Officials from the Department of Energy and representatives from the contract team, a partnership between Battelle and the University of North Dakota Energy & Environmental Research Center, will be on hand from 4:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Cobblestone Inn & Suites.
The estimated five-year, $35 million project, proposed across 20 acres of state land near Rugby, would provide data on whether deep borehole drilling is feasible for storage of DOE-managed waste. The plan has drawn the attention of residents and local officials concerned that the test, which will not involve nuclear waste, will eventually lead to waste storage in North Dakota.
Local farmer Chuck Volk has reportedly circulated a petition against the project, garnering more than 100 signatures at a recent farm show, according to The Associated Press.
