NUCLEAR WASTE; Obama admin says cleanup stimulus exceeds expectations

Mike Soraghan, E&E reporter / 335 words/ 22 April 2010/ Environment & Energy Daily/ ENEND/ English/
© 2010 E&E Publishing, LLC. All Rights Reserved

President Obama's stimulus plan has created more jobs than expected in the field of nuclear cleanup, an administration official testified yesterday.
The $6 billion in the stimulus plan for nuclear cleanup was projected to "create or save" 13,000 jobs. But the administration says it has exceeded that number by 3,000.
"We have been able to substantiate 16,000 workers," Inés Triay, DOE's assistant secretary for Environmental Management told the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
That number includes 9,200 direct jobs at contractors and subcontractors, and thousands more indirect jobs at vendor companies, such as those manufacturing the special shipping containers used to move nuclear waste, Triay said.
Subcommittee Chairman Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said the stimulus cleanup program has fallen behind and $1.7 billion has been spent, though he cautioned against haste. "It is less important that this work be done quickly than correctly," Nelson said.
The government's effort to clean up Cold War legacy radioactive waste is often criticized for costly delays and missed deadlines. The $6 billion boost from the $787 billion economic stimulus bill was intended to speed up some cleanup efforts, including removing uranium mill tailings from a Moab, Utah, site and accelerating processing of transuranic wastes from 11 sites.
Though some projects have fallen years behind schedule, the Obama administration did not seek significant boosts for the Environmental Management program's fiscal 2011 budget.
The administration did target the Office of River Protection for a $60 million research and development program to help stabilize and dispose of radioactive liquid tank waste -- one of the most difficult cleanup challenges DOE faces and that, if fruitful, could help significantly decrease timelines for several cleanup sites. The office's goal is ultimately to reduce the legacy footprint by 40 percent by the end of fiscal 2011 and up to 90 percent by fiscal 2015.