The Department of Energy needs to be more realistic in tracking and reporting progress toward environmental milestones at its nuclear cleanup sites, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said Thursday.
“We found that DOE didn’t accurately track or report whether milestones were met, missed, or postponed. We also found that sites continually renegotiate milestones they are at risk of missing,” according to the report to a Senate Armed Services subcommittee.
The GAO reached this conclusion after taking a long look at milestones over the years at the Idaho National Laboratory, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina; Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; and the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The Energy Department is a party to 72 cleanup agreements, including deals with state regulators and legal settlements, and hundreds of milestones specifying remediation work actions, the GAO noted.
Office of Environmental Management (EM) headquarters and site officials are often not on the same page on monitoring key benchmarks, and deciding what is a major milestone. The four sites selected for review and headquarters provided GAO with different totals on the number of milestones in place. The congressional watchdog also found the sites sometimes fail to provide up-to-date information to headquarters.
The GAO also said the DOE cleanup office does not keep a comprehensive list of deadline changes. As a result, the Energy Department’s reports to Congress are faulty. The most recently renegotiated milestone dates are reported by EM, “with no indication of whether or how often those milestones have been missed or postponed.”
“DOE & South Carolina officials couldn’t recall any milestones missed (out of thousands completed) since cleanup began,” David Trimble, co-director of the GAO’s Nuclear Security and Cleanup team, tweeted on Thursday. “Since Hanford cleanup began in 1989, officials counted more than 1,300 milestones completed & only 62 missed.”
For one example, the GAO pointed to reports on substantial completion of construction on low-activity waste facilities for the Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford. In Environmental Management’s 2012 future cleanup plan the milestone was listed as the end of 2014. The same report in 2017 said LAW construction would be substantially complete at the end of 2020.
The DOE office fails to prepare root cause analyses on missed or postponed work targets, congressional auditors wrote.
The Office of Environmental Management has lability for around $500 billion for remediation up of 16 Cold War and Manhattan Project sites around the country. The liability is growing despite DOE spending around $6 billion annually on remediation, GAO said.
The GAO recommended the Energy Department set up a standard definition of milestones and a reliable way of updating them across the complex. The Office of Environmental Management should also track original milestone dates and changes. The report also recommends the cleanup office report annually to Congress on the status of its cleanup milestones, in compliance with the 2011 National Defense Authorization Act.
Finally, the GAO said the Energy Department should do more analysis of missed or postponed deadlines to better understand why targets are not met.
“While EM does not believe a milestone tracking system can drive cleanup performance by itself, EM agrees that tracking milestones is an important tool and plans to make the milestone tracking system more effective and efficient,” a DOE spokesperson said Friday. “More importantly, EM believes its recent initiatives to include end-state contracting, a new fee advisory board, and enhancements to Performance Evaluation and Management Plans (PEMPs) will drive significant improvements in cleanup performance.”
This was the second GAO report in recent weeks to scrutinize the Office of Environmental Management. A Jan. 29 report addressed the spiraling liability estimate for nuclear cleanup within the weapons complex, and said the DOE office did not have a good handle on the reasons for spiking costs.
