IG: Energy should reevaluate plans to bury depleted uranium oxide
Severe budget cuts in Office of Environmental Management led department to drop promising research.
In 2010, the Energy Department plans to begin converting uranium hexafluoride, a byproduct of the uranium enrichment process, into depleted uranium oxide, a stable material classified as low-level waste. The department then plans to spend about $428 million to bury it -- all 550,000 metric tons of it -- during the next 25 years.
But Gregory Friedman, Energy's inspector general, said there are promising potential uses for the material and the department could avoid millions of dollars in disposal costs if it pursued them. In a report released on Wednesday, the IG found that Energy had cut funding to a number of viable research programs aimed at reusing the depleted uranium oxide.
Senior managers told the IG they discontinued the research because the technology budget for the Office of Environmental Management had been severely cut during the Bush administration. Another factor in the decision was that no single reuse alternative would consume the entire inventory of depleted uranium oxide and officials wanted to avoid a piecemeal solution.
"We did not find these reasons to be compelling in light of the potential to avoid significant disposal costs," Friedman wrote in a memorandum to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. The research programs cost a small fraction of the $428 million the department plans to spend burying the waste. For example, one promising application for using the material for radiation-shielding products was slated to receive $420,000 in 2004, but the department invested only $125,000 before canceling the project altogether.
Between 2002 and 2007, Environmental Management's technology development budget was cut from about $200 million to $21 million, the IG found.
"Modest investments sufficient to continue the research for alternative use for depleted uranium oxide have the potential to avoid significant disposal costs," the IG found. There could be other benefits as well. For example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory discovered in 2006 that depleted uranium aggregate could be combined with concrete to provide shielding for radiation from spent nuclear fuel -- a finding with broad commercial and government applications.
The Oak Ridge study showed that using the material in radiation shielding had the potential to consume the entire inventory of depleted uranium, thus negating the department's concerns about a piecemeal approach to reusing the material, the IG noted. Other applications could consume half or more of the inventory.
In response to the IG's findings, Inés Triay, acting assistant secretary for Environmental Management, said the office would issue an "expression of interest" to gauge industry's desire to use depleted uranium oxide.