The Department of Energy’s cleanup of the nuclear weapons complex could last until the year 2100 and cost between 641 billion and 840 billion dollars, and a complex legal and regulatory framework is making it slower and more expensive than the contamination requires, the Government Accountability Office reported. Cleanup proceeds under three laws with different requirements, applications and regulators, producing inconsistent approaches, regulator disputes and, in GAO’s words, unachievable requirements.
One driver is jurisdiction. Experts GAO convened with the National Academies said some states are taking regulatory actions on the radiological portion of DOE waste that may exceed their authority, since radiological hazards are generally regulated by DOE under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, while states act under Environmental Protection Agency authorisations for hazardous waste. The resulting disputes have added billions in costs, GAO said, and the statutes and case law are unclear, in part because most of the waste is mixed waste containing both kinds of hazard.
A second driver is assumption. DOE has agreed to clean some areas to residential standards where no residential use is planned, without evaluating what a less stringent standard would cost. GAO offers the counterexample: at Rocky Flats in Colorado, congressional designation as a wildlife refuge cut the estimated cleanup cost from 23 billion dollars to about 10 billion dollars. Groundwater standards compound the problem, with some contaminant limits resting on scientific information from the 1960s.
GAO asks Congress to consider clarifying the Atomic Energy Act’s preemption, creating a route for DOE to appeal state actions to EPA, and directing how future land use assumptions enter cleanup decisions, and it makes six recommendations to DOE and EPA, including an interagency expert task force. DOE and EPA each concurred with two recommendations and declined one. Yesterday’s companion report on future land use at DOE cleanup sites, and this one, together frame the liability: the schedule to 2100 is set less by the waste than by the rules for deciding how clean is clean enough.