DOE Nuclear Waste Cleanup: GAO Warns That Aging Infrastructure Requires Better Data and Clearer Prioritization

The U.S. Government Accountability Office’s May 2026 report, Nuclear Waste Cleanup: Better Data and Project Prioritization Vital to Managing Aging Infrastructure and Communicating Needs, examines how the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management manages the infrastructure that supports the nation’s nuclear waste cleanup mission. The report was issued under the direction of Nathan Anderson, with staff acknowledgments to Allison Bawden, Joseph Cook, Debbie Chung, Doreen Feldman, R. Scott Fletcher, Alison O’Neill, Sarah Veale, and Jack Wang. GAO’s analysis is important because EM’s cleanup mission depends on thousands of aging facilities, utilities, structures, and support systems, many of which were built decades ago and now operate beyond their original design life.

EM is responsible for addressing hazardous and radioactive waste created by decades of nuclear weapons production and nuclear energy research. This work is complex, expensive, and long-term. GAO notes that EM manages cleanup activities across a national complex of sites and depends on functional infrastructure to deactivate and decommission contaminated facilities, remediate soil and groundwater, and operate waste treatment systems. The report places this issue within a broader federal real property risk context: deferred maintenance and repair backlogs have long contributed to federal real property management’s inclusion on GAO’s High-Risk List.

GAO found that EM reported more than $1.5 billion in repair needs across approximately 4,300 operating facilities as of June 2025. Although EM data showed that about 80 percent of its facilities were in “good” or “very good” condition, GAO cautions that even a small number of poor-condition, mission-critical assets can create significant safety, schedule, and cost risks. Examples include aging electrical distribution systems at Idaho and a mission-critical crane at Savannah River’s H Canyon with components roughly 70 years old. These examples illustrate a central point: infrastructure risk is not merely a matter of aggregate condition scores; the failure of a single critical asset can disrupt cleanup operations.

The report also shows that EM’s maintenance spending is rising substantially. EM’s fiscal year 2026 budget request included more than $950 million for direct-funded maintenance and repair, an approximately 80 percent increase from fiscal year 2020. GAO’s graphics show that this spending is unevenly distributed across the complex, with major sites such as Hanford and Savannah River accounting for a large share of planned maintenance spending. Eight of 13 responding EM sites expected infrastructure and repair spending to increase over the next five years.

GAO’s principal concern is not simply that EM has aging infrastructure, but that its data and planning practices are not sufficiently reliable or comparable. EM relies on the Facilities Information Management System to track asset condition, repair needs, deferred maintenance, and other infrastructure data. Yet GAO found that some validation scorecards included inaccurate or unsupported data, and some lacked completed corrective action plans. GAO also found that sites used different methods to generate certain data elements, including deferred maintenance and annual actual maintenance. This limits EM’s ability to compare needs across sites and prioritize investments consistently.

GAO further found that EM’s Master Asset Plan does not fully capture site-level maintenance needs. Eight of 13 sites reported that the plan does not reflect their maintenance needs, partly because sites maintain more granular data than headquarters uses. GAO also found that EM had identified 19 unfunded projects that could generate approximately $120 million in savings if completed with surplus funds, but had not communicated those potential benefits to Congress.

GAO made four recommendations to DOE, focused on improving data accuracy and comparability, incorporating more site-level information into planning, and communicating potential cost-saving maintenance projects to Congress. DOE concurred with two recommendations and partially concurred with two. The report’s broader lesson is clear: EM cannot manage nuclear cleanup infrastructure effectively through incomplete data, inconsistent site practices, or under-communicated investment tradeoffs. For a mission measured in decades and billions of dollars, disciplined infrastructure planning is itself a cleanup requirement.

Disclaimer:
This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal, engineering, environmental, nuclear safety, or procurement advice. Readers should review the full GAO report, DOE orders, site-specific data, and applicable federal requirements before relying on any conclusions.