Report: U.S. agency holding nukes struggles with oversight

DOE’s $30B funding mostly for contracts

The U.S. Department of Energy has its share of challenges as it conducts some of the world’s most high-tech research, maintains a stockpile of nuclear weapons and cleans up after decades of bomb making.

A report released last week outlines some of those struggles while providing a look at the expansive scope of the department’s responsibilities and costly liabilities.

According to work over the past year, the agency’s inspector general says a growing problem is oversight and management of more than 11,300 contracts to keep operations humming at 17 national laboratories, dozens of contaminated sites and other facilities.

The Energy Department is the largest civilian contracting agency within the federal government. About 90 percent of the $30 billion it gets each year goes toward contracts.

The inspector general’s findings this year on the oversight of those contracts is nothing new because federal accountants have called contract management within the agency “high risk” since 1990. The difference is officials are starting to look closer at subcontractors.

The report identifies millions of dollars in losses related to quality assurance at sites in Washington state, New Mexico and South Carolina.

At the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Wash., contractors have paid millions to settle allegations that they provided inadequate materials, claimed unnecessary overtime, mischarged costs and exposed the agency to undue financial risk, the report said.

At the nation’s only underground nuclear waste repository in southern New Mexico, concerns about quality assurance were raised again in September, the report noted. The facility is ramping up work again following a nearly three-year shutdown caused by a radiation release. The closure put a serious wrinkle in the nation’s efforts to clean up Cold War-era waste.

According to the report, the department has spent over $164 billion to treat and dispose of nuclear and hazardous waste, and has completed cleanup at 91 of 107 sites since 1989. In the past six years alone, the department has spent $35 billion on the work. Officials say the contamination makes for complex problems that often require first-of-their-kind solutions.

Overall, environmental liability has roughly doubled from a low 20 years ago to $372 billion for the 2016 fiscal year. Half of that liability is at Hanford and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.

The Energy Department has about 88 million gallons of liquid waste stored in underground tanks and an additional 4,000 cubic meters of solid waste stored in bins. Cost estimates for treating and disposing of the waste exceed $50 billion.

Officials aim to ship some of it to the repository in New Mexico.

The Energy Department has a massive inventory of buildings that cost $2 billion a year to operate and maintain. Many are old and officials worry about keeping up with more modern demands.

That also goes for the nuclear stockpile and the infrastructure needed to maintain it.