WASHINGTON, D.C. – EM Assistant Secretary Monica Regalbuto joined other Department officials, members of Congress, contractors, and other stakeholders at an event on Capitol Hill for the bipartisan House Nuclear Cleanup Caucus to discuss forging a path to clean up the more than 2,000 excess facilities in the Department’s inventory — a number expected to grow by 1,000 in the next 10 years.

   During a panel discussion, Regalbuto told a packed room that a strategy to address the contaminated excess facilities needs to consider realistic funding; prioritizing, scheduling, and sequencing of work; and developing and applying cost-saving technologies.

   “Many contractors here have championed this over the past years, and I’m sure we can successfully do this as we move forward,” she said. EM’s fiscal year 2017 budget request includes $887 million for facility deactivation and decommissioning — about 15 percent of the program’s annual budget. 

   The caucus serves to advocate for cleanup and provide updates on the EM program to members of Congress. Participants stressed there’s an urgent need to address high-hazard excess facilities across the complex to lower risks for safety and avoid escalating costs, such as the surveillance and maintenance budgets approaching $30 million for facilities at the Paducah Site, according to panelist Mark Duff, director of Environmental Management for the Fluor Paducah Deactivation Project.

   Front-end investments prevent the structures from becoming “unstable or fundamentally dangerous, not only in their risk to the environment but most importantly to the people who are ultimately going to do the work to remedy these buildings or ultimately deactivate them and demolish them,” said panelist Ken Rueter, president and project manager of URS|CH2M Oak Ridge LLC, EM’s cleanup contractor for the Oak Ridge Reservation.

   “The risk factor can’t even be measured with regard to how much it’s lowered,” he said of the investment.

   Reps. Chuck Fleischmann (R-Tenn.), caucus chairman, Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.), caucus co-chair, Mike Simpson (R-Id.), Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), and Joe Wilson (R.-S.C.) spoke briefly prior to the panel discussion to weigh in on the excess facilities issue and voice support for their cleanup.

   Fleischmann thanked Regalbuto for her work with Congress, and her commitment to the cleanup caucus. 

   “It means a lot to the communities, it means a lot to the contractors, it means a lot to the DOE folks,” he said.

   Luján said disposition of the excess facilities is important to workers in his district, home to DOE’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.

   “We greatly increased our understanding and awareness of the environmental and health impacts and the decades of work at our national labs. But they continue to pose impacts as well to the health of the lab workers, the community and to the environment,” he said.

   “We want to work with you,” Simpson told Regalbuto. “The real experts are the people in the Department of Energy and the contractors out there doing the job on the ground.”

   Regalbuto noted that Secretary Ernest Moniz established a working group in 2015 to analyze and develop options for the excess facilities. 

   DOE has completed more than 3,000 deactivation and decommissioning projects that have removed facilities and closed several major sites, such as Rocky Flats in Colorado. The remaining excess facilities fall under EM as well as the Department’s offices of Nuclear Energy and Science, and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA).

   The Manhattan Project facilities at the Y-12 National Security Complex are a concern because they are in close proximity to operating facilities for NNSA, said panelist Ken Harrawood, senior director of Y-12 Legacy Facility Disposition.

   “The work we do within NNSA is very vital to the national security,” he said. “We need to deal with it now, not later. The impacts are right in front of us.” 

   The panel discussion was sponsored by the Energy Technology and Environmental Business Association, Nuclear Energy Institute, and Energy Facility Contractors Group. Other 2016 caucus events are scheduled for June 8 and Sept. 14.