Nuclear Science

In response to a congressional request, GAO reported on issues concerning: (1) the size and nature of the Department of Energy's (DOE) investment, prior to congressional approval, in new high-energy and nuclear physics accelerator facilities or major upgrades; and (2) the events and procedures leading to DOE review and approval for building a continuous electron beam accelerator facility.

GAO found that: (1) the DOE practice of incrementally funding projects and omitting project technical uncertainties in budget requests makes it difficult for Congress to assess the affordability of such projects; (2) past DOE budget requests for the upgrade of an existing accelerator or the construction of a new one were often based on incomplete information; (3) the DOE definition of a project lacks specific criteria on when a project starts and ends and what components should be included; and (4) the DOE physics program offices have defined an accelerator project as the effort during construction. GAO also found that: (1) DOE budget requests frequently do not include costs for equipment and other project-specific components that planning documents indicate are needed to make an upgrade or new facility complete and operational; (2) including these omitted costs would increase the DOE-estimated cost of the total upgrade from about $212 million to $579 million; and (3) accelerator projects which incur substantial costs were not disclosed as project-related expenses before Congress approved the construction costs. GAO estimated the cost for the projects' preconstruction at about $400 million, $352 million of which DOE did not identify in its budget request.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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