July 13, 2011
By John Fleck
From the Albuquerque Journal
The Department of Energy claimed success when it used $172 million in stimulus money to create jobs for radioactive waste shipment crews, but there wasn’t always enough work for them to do.
According to an internal Energy Department investigation, the extra money for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant was used to hire about 400 workers with the intent of increasing the radioactive waste shipment rate.
But despite the additional manpower, the shipment rate fell far short of the promised goal.
Federal stimulus money spent on a program to ship nuclear waste to New Mexico was successful at creating jobs, but fell short of its waste shipment goals, according to government investigators.
Investigators criticized the DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office for measuring success by the number of jobs created “as opposed to measuring performance based on the actual utilization of those resources.”
The plan, according to the report from the DOE Office of Inspector General, was to increase the shipment rate from 19 truckloads of nuclear waste per week to 35, with the ability to occasionally “surge” to 41 shipments per week from various waste sites.
Overall, the shipment rate was 31 percent below the level promised when the stimulus money was allocated and only hit the 35-per-week mark twice between May 2009 and December 2010.
Officials at the Carlsbad Field Office defended the performance, saying they needed to keep enough staff on hand to handle the “maximum planned capacity” for waste disposal operations at WIPP, even when actual shipments fell short.
The Carlsbad office oversees WIPP, a 2,150-foot-deep southeast New Mexico salt mine where plutonium-contaminated waste from nuclear weapons design and manufacturing has been buried since 1999.
A field office spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday, or to requests for more information on waste shipment rates, budgets and detailed job numbers. The report did not specify how many of the jobs were created in New Mexico, or how many were at sites around the country where waste awaits shipment.
The $172 million was allocated in 2009 as part of a massive federal effort to stimulate the economy.
Missing goals
The program has for years failed to meet waste shipment goals laid out in its annual congressional budget requests.
In 2009, for example, the department told Congress it needed to be ready to handle 26 shipments per week, but only hit that target eight times, averaging fewer than 19 shipments per week for the year.
“This is a continuing problem,” said watchdog Don Hancock of the Southwest Research and Information Service in Albuquerque.
Hancock and others warned in 2009, when the stimulus funding for WIPP was announced, that the program was at risk for the very problems identified by the DOE Inspector General in its new report.
Waste destined for WIPP comes from 10 sites around the country, with the largest shares coming from Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and Rocky Flats in Colorado, which is now closed.
Careful preparations at the sending site are needed, including certification that the waste drums don’t contain prohibited waste, things such as explosives or liquids.
The Energy Department, anxious to clean up those sites, has pushed to move the waste to WIPP quickly, but the effort has been slowed by difficulties getting waste prepared for shipment.
Despite that problem, the department decided in 2009 to spend an extra $172 million in stimulus money over three years, above and beyond WIPP’s normal budget of $230 million per year, to speed up waste shipments.