[CPEO-MEF] RADIATION, FUNDING: "Massive Nuclear Cleanup Hobbled by Funding Shortfall"

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Massive Nuclear Cleanup Hobbled by Funding Shortfall
Budget woes hit Energy Department operation to clean up contamination from nuclear-weapons program

By John R. Emshwiller and Gary Fields
Wall Street Journal
November 1, 2015 

LIVERMORE, Calif. - About 45 miles southeast of San Francisco, in an 800-acre mini-city built to create atomic bombs, there’s a contaminated building slated for eventual demolition.

Mark Costella, a facilities manager at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, would prefer to tear down the structure, but doesn’t have the tens of millions of dollars needed. Instead, he’s spending $500,000 to fix the roof.

These are the kinds of contradictions at the heart of the complicated, expensive and struggling effort to clean up America’s 70-year-old nuclear-weapons program.

The Energy Department’s cleanup operation is wrestling with reduced budgets, tens of billions of dollars in ballooning cost estimates and 2,700 structures on its to-do list. Officials said more than 350 additional unneeded facilities controlled by other programs in the Energy Department are likely eligible for transfer to the cleanup operation. But that office said its funds are limited and it isn’t accepting any more projects for now, no matter their significance.

…

For the entire article, see
http://www.wsj.com/articles/massive-nuclear-cleanup-hobbled-by-funding-shortfall-1446409369

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Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope Street
Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650-961-8918 or 650-969-1545
Fax: 650-961-8918
LSiegel@cpeo.org
http://www.cpeo.org

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