GAO urges DOE to seek waivers on drinking water remediation standards

To contain the multibillion-dollar costs of cleaning up contaminated groundwater, the Department of Energy planned to implement recommendations from the Government Accountability Office by April 2027.

Candice Trummel, senior advisor for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, informed the Government Accountability Office (GAO) of the decision in a letter appended to a GAO report released this week. 

The report urged DOE’s nuclear cleanup office to take steps, including seeking waivers where “technically impractical,” to remediate groundwater to comply with the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.

Also in the report, GAO said DOE is presently “unable to identify comprehensive information on the scope, cost, and schedule of groundwater cleanup” across the old nuclear weapons complex because the agency’s database lumps together groundwater and soil cleanup information. The cleanup office said it expects to have the data issue fixed within a year.

The drinking water standard waiver can be sought at sites governed by the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980 (CERCLA), best known as the Superfund law, GAO said in the report.

Two of the four sites examined by the GAO, the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and the Hanford Site in Washington state, are looking into waivers for certain groundwater plumes, the congressional watchdog said. Neither has gotten a waiver from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as of September, GAO said.

These sorts of waivers “are contaminant- or area-specific” and could allow sites “to implement an alternative clean up strategy” when meeting the drinking water standard is impractical from an engineering perspective, GAO said.

According to a footnote, EPA has granted such waivers in past situations for geologic considerations, such as fractured bedrock, or where “the presence of contaminants that are denser than water and dissolve slowly or not at all.”

GAO said in the report that groundwater cleanup at Oak Ridge, Hanford, the Portsmouth Site in Ohio and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina could take 54 years and cost $10-billion. Contaminated groundwater at these sites is currently considered either an “actual or potential” source of drinking water, GAO said.

Trummell, in comments included in the report, said DOE will have comprehensive groundwater data ready by September 2025 and should produce a list of short-term goals by September 2026. In addition, “performance metrics” will be developed to guide groundwater decisions by April 2027.

The Nov. 19 GAO report was developed at the request of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.