A Department of Energy advisory board is drafting a report to help the Office of Environmental Management develop a complex-wide priorities list for nuclear cleanup complex.
The DOE Environmental Management Advisory Board could vote later this fall on a subcommittee report into how to make remediation of 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project sites more risk-informed.
The effort is partially in response to an October 2019 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report that found DOE’s approach to setting remediation priorities is too ad hoc, said advisory board member Amy Fitzgerald, during Tuesday’s online meeting.
The final subcommittee report should be ready for the full committee to vote on in either late October or early November, officials said during the meeting held via Zoom.
“I know a lot of you have heard the question, ‘how clean is clean,’” said Fitzgerald, who directs government affairs and information services for the City of Oak Ridge, Tenn., home to DOE’s Oak Ridge Site. There the Office of Environmental Management and its contractor have finished cleanup of what’s dubbed the East Tennessee Technology Park, the old K-25 uranium enrichment complex that is being converted into an industrial park.
The Oak Ridge facility and the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant in Colorado, which now serves as home to a federal wildlife refuge don’t necessarily need to be returned to a pristine state, Fitzgerald said. It depends upon the ultimate land use, she added.
The draft report, not yet released publicly, is meant to help the Office of Environmental Management better digest the risks posed by nuclear waste and facilities across the complex, said board member James Rispoli, a consultant who headed DOE’s cleanup program from 2005 through 2008 during the second term of President George W. Bush.
Once the nuclear office understands the risks better, it can decide whether to accept, mitigate or remediate those risks, Rispoli said. Many of the 16 sites have their own priorities list of what projects should be addressed first. But as the GAO said there does not appear to be a national priorities list for the Environmental Management office. Also, methodologies used by the sites and their contractors to assess hazards vary, he added.
In addition to radiation and chemical risk, there is also “infrastructure risk” such as the collapse of an underground tunnel used to store contaminated old equipment at the Hanford Site in Washington state, Rispoli said.
Because all the sites are unique, however, it is important local communities play a key role in helping the DOE sites weigh the relative risks, said advisory board member Diahann Howard, economic development director at the Port of Benton in Washington state.
The Environmental Management Advisory Board (EMAB) is designed to provide independent and external advice, to DOE’s assistant secretary for environmental management. The duties of the assistant secretary are currently being done by career federal manager, William (Ike) White in his role as senior advisor at the cleanup office.
