Budget Hobbles Nuclear Cleanup

Budget woes hit Energy Department operation to clean up contamination from nuclear-weapons program

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.

That means some of the nation’s toughest threats are now on the back burner, possibly for decades, while some relatively low-priority work moves forward.

Dirty and decaying structures where weapons work and other federal nuclear activities were carried out—some the size of several football fields and old enough to qualify for Social Security—are clustered in federal sites from South Carolina to California. Some are within easy walking distance of people’s homes.

Congress and government watchdogs have started raising alarms about the stockpile of contaminated buildings, warning that some of the facilities pose a health risk to the public and that the cost of dealing with them will only increase the longer they remain standing. Provisions directing the administration to address the issue were included in Congress’s 2016 defense bill, vetoed by President Barack Obama earlier this month.

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