The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers could counter a dramatic spike in its environmental liability by using new management practices at the 19 nuclear-weapon sites it is cleaning up, Congress’ investigative arm said this week.
The secretary of the Army should also ensure the Corps develops a lifecycle cost estimate for the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP), the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said in a report published Tuesday,
“Since 2016, FUSRAP’s environmental liability has risen by nearly $1 billion, an increase that officials attribute to uncertainties, along with inflation,” GAO wrote in the report, the product of a year-and-a-half-long audit. A better “roadmap” is needed to effectively track sites progress and challenges, the GAO said in the report.
Of the 19 current FUSRAP sites, four are highly-contaminated and make up about three-quarters of the estimated $2.6- billion environmental liability in fiscal 2022, GAO said. “But the Corps isn’t using opportunities to manage this work in a coordinated centralized way.”
The four biggest cleanups are the Niagara Falls Storage Site in New York state, the Shallow Land Disposal Area in Pennsylvania, North St. Louis County Sites in Missouri and Guterl Specialty Steel in New York state, according to GAO. The corps cleans up sites that supported the Manhattan Project.
GAO did the performance audit from April 2022 to September 2023. It received input from 16 stakeholder groups including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, tribal nations and state regulatory agencies.
The Department of Defense agreed with the recommendations outlined in the GAO report.
FUSRAP was created in 1974 by a Department of Energy predecessor agency, and transferred by Congress to the Army Corps in 1997. FUSRAP is subject to regulatory provisions of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, also known as Superfund.
Unlike most of the Cold War and Manhattan Project sites overseen by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management, most of the Corps’ FUSRAP sites tend to be privately-owned and located in urban areas, according to GAO. The urban locales can sometimes make environmental assessments difficult. “For example, the Corps did not have access to certain contaminated soils that were under buildings and other structures at the St. Louis Downtown Site.”
