Nuclear cleanup awards questioned

The Energy Department is releasing more than $6 billion in stimulus money for contractors, including many that have been cited for serious safety violations and costly mistakes, to clean up nuclear sites.  The cleanup program, long plagued by cost overruns and delays, is designated by the Government Accountability Office as "at high risk for fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement."  Former Ploughshares grantee Gerry Pollet of Heart of America Northwest said, "The very contractors that have been responsible for cost overruns and serious delays have proposed how to pump stimulus money back into the project. [The companies] are set to get hundreds of millions of dollars on top of the money they've already received, for the same projects they've seriously mismanaged."

A Hanford treatment plant will receive $44 million in stimulus funding to design a facility to process leftover waste. But because that plant is still under construction, nuclear engineers say it is premature to design the new facility.  "It doesn't make sense," said Arjun Makhijani of the Ploughshares-funded Institute for Energy and Environmental Research and an expert on the Hanford site. "It's like figuring out what you are going to do with spare parts from a car you are going to build before you build the car. What they design today will be obsolete by the time the plant is up and operating in 2019."