Calendar Year 2020

Fifty years of defense production has resulted in significant subsurface contamination at the Department of Energy's Hanford Site. An estimated 450 billion galls of liquid waste, some containing radionuclides and hazardous chemicals, have been released to the ground at Hanford since 1944. Much of the contamination remains above the groundwater in the vadose zone, the region between the land surface and underlying groundwater, but some has reached Hanford's groundwater. The Richarland Operations Office estimated that 80 square miles of Hanford's ground water had contaminated levels greated than Federal and State drinking water standards. Although groundwater at Hanford is not a primary source of drinking water, it does eventually flow into the Columbia River, a major drinking water source for a significant section of the Nortwest.

The Office of Inspector General (OIG) received several allegations related to the transport of handguns by National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) affiliated personnel between Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Las Vegas, Nevada, where a training exercise involving NNSA's Office of Secure Transportation (OST) was to be held. One of the allegations was that on October 14, 2003, two employees of Wakehurst Servics, Inc., an NNSa contractor, transported handguns on board an NNSA aircraft ferrying Federal and contractor personnel from Albuquerque to Las Vegas for the exercise. NNSA has a fleet of aircraft that support the OST mission, and they are house on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

In Fiscal Year 2003, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission devoted approximately $9.3 million of its $23 million information technology budget to the development, operation, and maintenance of its systems. Much of this activity was intended to satisfy the President's Management Agenda initiative to expand electronic government in order to make information and services more accessible to the public and Commission staff through the Internet. In an effort to streamline its operations, in 1999 the Commission deployed its FERC Automated Management Information System (FAMIS) to provide a web-based system for internal document training and workload management. Recently, the Commission launched FERC Online, a $31 million project that consolidated nine separate development initiatives designed to provide a web-based system for managing both public and internal information.

Department of Energy sites rely heavily on radio communications to support or facilitate activities such as site emergency response, maintenance, physical security, and protections. The Oark Ridge Reservation, which consists of the Oak Ridge Operations Office, Oake Ridge National Laboratory, East Tennessee Technology Park, and the Y-12 National Security Complex, is dependent on radio communications to link these co-located but separately managed organizations. The Manager of the Oak Ridge Operations Office has been designated the lead Federal manager for radio communications on the Reservation and provides general direction regarding system plans, certification requests, and frequency authorizations for a variety of radio communications systems.