12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions · Minor
Continue and accelerate DOE remediation of Manhattan Project and Cold War waste
Printed page 371 12. Department of Energy and Related Commissions
“Continue DOE’s remediation of radioactive waste created by the nuclear weapons projects from the Manhattan Project and Cold War. Strong leadership focused on accelerating the cleanup, coupled with technical and administrative innovation, will be needed to reduce the federal government’s third largest liability.”
What has happened
- Done
The acceleration limb: EM adopted a dual glass-plus-grout strategy for Hanford tank waste and submitted two permit modification requests to Washington State Ecology that would let treated low-activity waste be grouted and shipped out of state, which EM says would raise treatment throughput by up to 300 percent and cut disposal cost from about $1,200 to under $50 a gallon. Hanford marked its 24th single-shell tank retrieval the same day.
- Done
The Office of Environmental Management continues and is funded: P.L. 119-74 appropriates $322,371,000 for non-defense environmental cleanup and $865,000,000 to the Uranium Enrichment Decontamination and Decommissioning Fund, alongside the defense environmental cleanup accounts, and EM keeps its site-specific advisory boards and cleanup program at every legacy site.
Research log
What was searched, and what didn’t count as evidence
Research notes
A continuation ask: done while the remediation continues, and reversed if it stops. The Quote’s second sentence asks for leadership focused on accelerating the cleanup with technical and administrative innovation; the dual glass-plus-grout strategy and the permit modification requests are that, so the acceleration limb is recorded as a second done event rather than a lower rung.
The same instruments carry #998, #1000, #1001 and #1002, each on its own reading.
- Action
- other
- Object
- DOE remediation of Manhattan Project and Cold War nuclear sites
- ID
- 938