The U.S. Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management should revamp its 2017 nuclear cleanup policy to make its remediation decisions more risk-informed, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
Reports issued since the 1990s by the GAO and DOE’s Office of Inspector General urged the nuclear cleanup office to make its decisions more risk-based — meaning to “consider trade-offs among risk, costs, and other factors in the face of uncertainty and diverse stakeholder perspectives,” the congressional watchdog said in a just-released report.
Such a policy reduces risk to human health and safety, and to the environment, while also complying with relevant laws and court orders and trying to limit costs, the GAO said. A 2017 DOE cleanup policy does not spell out how the agency can go about making its decisions more risk-based, its report notes.
After a significant amount of research, and conferring with experts assembled by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, the GAO issued a “framework” to assist DOE in making cleanup decisions. This should include phases for design, analysis, decision making, and implementation/evaluation.
Such a framework is lacking at the Energy Department, but it is needed because the agency accounts for more than 80% of the federal government’s $577 billion in 2018 environmental liability, the GAO said. Drafting a policy to focus more on the highest risk would be most effective in curbing liability, according to the report.
