Nuclear Waste

Changes Needed in DOE User-Fee Assessments to Avoid Funding Shortfall Gao ID: RCED-90-65 June 7, 1990

Pursuant to a legislative requirement, GAO provided information on the Department of Energy's (DOE) efforts to implement nuclear waste legislation.

GAO found that: (1) the nuclear waste program might be susceptible to future budget shortfalls; (2) without a fee increase, the civilian waste part of the program might be underfunded by at least $2.4 billion; (3) DOE has neither paid its share of costs nor disclosed this liability in its financial records; (4) DOE estimates did not adequately recognize program uncertainties; (5) DOE intends to address one major cost uncertainty by indexing the civilian disposal fee to the inflation rate; and (6) DOE did not use a realistic inflation rate as its most probable scenario in assessing whether user fees were adequate.

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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