The Department of Energy’s nuclear-weapons cleanup office will by January 2026 evaluate the effectiveness of nine citizen-staffed boards that provide non-binding advice to the agency, the office said in a report published Monday.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) mentioned the review in a letter appended to a report published Monday by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and titled “Nuclear Waste Cleanup, Adopting Leading Practices Could Strengthen DOE’s Engagement with Stakeholders and Governments.”
At GAO’s recommendation, EM plans on “analyzing” these groups, called site-specific advisory boards, but the agency did not say exactly how.
“The expected mechanism to complete an objective evaluation will require planning for additional support, engagement, and development of the evaluation,” reads a letter to GAO from Candice Robertson, the senior advisory for Environmental Management at DOE headquarters in Washington. GAO appended the letter to its report.
Robertson said also in her letter, and also in response to GAO recommendations in the report, that EM will “develop a national framework” for local engagement near its sites by February 28, 2025 and create an agency-wide template for engaging with members of the public near the sites by May 30, 2025.
“EM has no overarching guidance outlining an approach for how its cleanup sites are to engage with stakeholders and governments. Instead, EM Headquarters delegates engagement to each cleanup site,” GAO wrote in its report.
The eight site-specific EM advisory boards are located at:
Hanford Site, Washington state.
Idaho Site, Idaho.
Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico
Nevada Site, Nevada.
Oak Ridge Site, Tennessee.
Paducah Site, Kentucky.
Portsmouth Site, Ohio.
Savannah River Site, South Carolina.