Todd Jacobson
WC Monitor
3/20/2015
Fourteen vacant National Nuclear Security Administration facilities have languished since 2009 without being decontaminated or decommissioned due to a lack of funding, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management may not be properly prioritizing the facilities it takes from the NNSA, the Government Accountability Office said in a report released this week. Overall, the GAO said NNSA plans to transfer 83 facilities to EM over the next 25 years, including 27 that are still operational.
Another 56 are not operational right now, including some where contamination is spreading, but the GAO said EM does not take into account the risks at NNSA facilities when developing its annual facility disposition plan. That’s despite a 2006 directive calling for EM to consider such facilities in its planning efforts. “Without integrating NNSA’s inventory of nonoperational facilities into its process for prioritizing facilities for disposition, EM may be prioritizing cleanup for lower-risk facilities under its management ahead of facilities at NNSA that may present a higher risk of spreading contamination,” the GAO said.
Cost of Maintaining Facilities Rising
The problem, according to the GAO, is that some NNSA facilities are continuing to deteriorate, increasing costs to maintain them. At the Alpha-5 facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex, contamination such as mercury, beryllium and black mold, has spread over the last two years and its collapsing roof is in need of repair. That has driven the cost of maintaining the facility from $1.2 million from 2009 to 2011 to almost $4 million in 2012 and 2013.
Contamination is also spreading at the Heavy Elements facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which was shuttered in 1995, driving surveillance costs from $15,766 in FY 2009 to $607,044 in FY 2013. Another $1 million is needed to repair the facility’s roof, which is leaking above highly contaminated areas. The GAO said the NNSA spent nearly $34 million in FY 2013 maintaining 27 facilities marked to become nonoperational in the next 25 years and another $10 million on surveillance and monitoring activities for the 56 facilities that already have been shuttered.
EM to Take Broader Look at Facilities
The GAO said EM takes into account the risks to human health and the environment when it prioritizes facilities for decontamination and decommissioning only for facilities it has already accepted from the NNSA. That can lead to curious decisions, the GAO suggested, noting that EM completed the decommissioning of two uncontaminated water towers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2014 at a cost of $575,667. “According to one EM official at LANL, these water towers posed very little risk to human health and the environment,” the GAO said. “In contrast, NNSA’s Ion Beam Facility at LANL, a contaminated nonoperational facility that has been awaiting transfer to EM for 20 years, poses human health and environmental risks, according to NNSA documents and officials.”
Acting DOE cleanup chief Mark Whitney noted that the 2006 directive requiring EM to analyze the risks at all DOE facilities only applied to FY 2008 to FY 2012 budget requests, but he said EM was already examining a broader group of facilities as part of a Department-wide effort. In response to a January GAO report on DOE’s management of high-risk excess facilities, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz created a working group on excess contaminated facilities under the National Laboratory Operations Board. “DOE believes that implementation of these actions through the work of the Excess Contaminated Facilities Working Group will improve the management and eventual disposition of not only NNSA’s process-contaminated and high-risk facilities, but also will benefit EM in better planning and prioritizing D&D.”
