Excess Facility Disposition

Excess facilities take up valuable space that could be put to better use, and incur expenditures for surveillance and maintenance (S&M), environmental monitoring, and security. Beginning in FY 2002, Congress set aside $10 million for a new Facilities and Infrastructure program to improve facilities and infrastructure at the Department’s science laboratories. SC allocated all of this funding to dispose of excess facilities and established a new subprogram, Excess Facilities Disposition (EFD), under the Science Laboratories Infrastructure (SLI) program.

The EFD subprogram funds both demolition, as well as clean-up of excess facilities for reuse, if it is cost-effective and responsive to program needs.

From FY 2002 to FY 2007 $50.8M was used to demolish or clean up for reuse approximatley 1.1 million square feet of excess space at SC laboratories and at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (for demolition of Magnetic Fusion Energy legacy facilities, which were constructed with SC funding in the 1970's). ORNL accounted for the largest portion of the demolished/cleaned up space - approximately 57% of the total.

Beginning in FY 05, the focus of the EFD subprogram expanded from demolition and cleanout of non- or slightly contaminated facilities to demolition of deteriorating, legacy contaminated facilities which pose the greatest risk to the workers or the environment, and for which SC can "bank" space to satisfy the requirement for offsetting new construction with elimination of excess space.

The estimated cost for disposing SC facilities which are currently awaiting disposal, and those which will need to be disposed of in the future, is more than $400M (based on very preliminary field estimates). Most of the cost is associated with nuclear facilities at ANL, which are still operating, but for which no disposal pathway has been identified. It should be noted that this cost does not include disposal of SC facilities which arte in the baseline of the Office of Environemntal Management (EM) for disposition, or which are currently being considered for inclusion in the EM baseline, - e.g. the Oak Ridge Integrated Facilities Disposition Project (IFDP), which would clean-up the central part of the main ORNL campus plus parts of Y-12 at an estimated cost of $400 to $500 million.

The FY 2008 appropriation is $8.75M, including $6.145M for the Building 51 and Bevatron demolition project at LBNL.

The President's FY 2009 budget request is for $14.8M, primarily to continue demolition of Building 51 and the Bevatron. EFD funding for disposition of facilities other than the Bevatron would be phased out in the outyears. Instead, it is expcected that future disposition of small facilities would be funded as part of line-itmes or by Institutional General Plant Projects (IGPP).

For more information, see: The FY 2009 SLI Budget Request, Report pp 400-401.