Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Demolishing the Nuclear Reactor at the Hanford Site
President Obama’s stimulus package includes more than $6 billion in stimulus money to clean up 18 nuclear sites from New York to California. This is double the previous annual funding for the program. However, the contractors who have been criticized by government reports for mismanaging projects, creating cost overruns, and causing serious delays are the same companies that will receive the stimulus funding.
The cleanup program is classified by the Government Accountability Office as "at high risk for fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement." For example, according to the Energy Department, expected cleanup costs at all 22 sites have risen from $180 billion to $240 billion.
The contractors themselves, through friends in Congress, helped craft this portion of the stimulus package. Senator Patty Murphy (D-Wash) proposed a $6.4 billion plan and integrated the funding into the Senate bill, whereas the House version of the bill offered only $500 million. To support her request for more funding, Murphy maintained that the stimulus money for this project would create close to 13,000 jobs.
Ultimately, the final version of the bill included $6 billion for nuclear cleanup and the department will work with existing contractors to comply with spending deadlines to complete the work by the end of 2011.
One typical problem relates to the Hanford site in Washington. The stimulus plan allocates $44 million to design a facility to process leftover waste from the plant, even though the plant itself is still under construction and will not be operational until 2019, by which time, the facilty design will likely be out-of-date.
-Eve Myers
Nuclear Waste Cleanup Awards Questioned (by Kimberly Kindy, Washington Post)
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