Cleaning up the contamination left by Cold War nuclear weapons operations could cost the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) another $377 billion, or $109 billion more than last year’s estimate, the Government Accountability Office said in a report Tuesday.
Agency cleanup officials interviewed by GAO are aware of the increase, but have not done a root cause analysis on its growth, according to GAO.
The DOE office has spent about $170 billion since its creation in 1989, and has cleaned up 91 sites. But the remaining work at 16 locations is extremely costly and complicated, the GAO said.
From fiscal 2011 through fiscal 2017, the cleanup office spent about $40 billion, mostly on management and storage of radioactive tank waste and disposing of nuclear and hazardous materials. But during the same period, EM’s environmental liability swelled from $163 billion to $268 billion, according to the report.
There is a litany of reasons for this, including: inflation, the addition of new projects to the Environmental Management workload, accidents, technology problems, changes in scope, and revised expectations from state or federal regulators.
“EM’s recent budget materials have not provided required or accurate information on funding needed to meet future cleanup responsibilities,” David Trimble, co-director of the GAO Nuclear Security and Cleanup team, said in a series of tweets Tuesday.
The report is addressed to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) who chairs the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. It relies mostly on DOE financial data through fiscal 2017 together with the Energy Department’s fiscal 2018 financial report, released in December.
The Government Accountability Office looked not only at EM’s environmental liability, but how the office balances risks and costs and the adequacy of its budget materials in providing accurate information on needed funding.
The GAO makes three recommendations for the Office of Environmental Management. First, it needs a program-wide strategy to curb environmental risks across the weapons complex. Second, it should submit annual “future years” reports explaining growing cost estimates at individual sites. Finally, EM should disclose the funding needed “to meet all of its schedule milestones called for in compliance agreements.”
For example, the Tri-Party Agreement between DOE, Washington state, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, sets milestones for the Hanford Site.
The government auditor acknowledged figuring out future cleanup costs can be tough. There are instances in which “reasonable estimates cannot currently be generated,” because no feasible technical remedy exists for certain remediation jobs.
But there has been slow progress on big-ticket items such as doing something about the 90 million gallons of high-level radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Idaho National Laboratory, and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Three gallons have been treated with a test effort at Hanford; 7 million have been treated at SRS, and 1 million at Idaho, GAO said.
In addition to project oversight concerns, and the rising cost of treating radioactive waste, the projected tab is rising because some anticipated work is not recorded yet as a liability. Environmental Management is not required to account for facilities owned by other programs in its liability, the GAO said.
In March 2015, the GAO reported DOE’s semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) had identified 83 facilities to transfer to EM for disposition, and many of these contaminated structures were deteriorating. The anticipated cost of cleaning up 45 “high risk” excess facilities is $2.3 billion, according to the report.
Energy Department documents also indicate the cleanup office’s liability estimate does not include the $780 million anticipated to remediate eight of nine nuclear reactors at Hanford.
The GAO report suggests allowing each of EM’s 16 sites ranks its own priorities can complicate development of a cohesive national plan.
“Without a strategy that sets national priorities and describes how DOE will address its greatest risks, EM lacks assurance that it is making the most cost-effective cleanup decisions,” congressional auditors wrote. The office has made unsuccessful efforts over the years to develop a more uniform strategy. The initiatives “were either short-lived or never fully implemented.”
The Energy Department “agrees with the premise of the recommendations outlined in the report,” Assistant Secretary for Environmental Management Anne Marie White said in a Jan. 19 letter attached to the GAO document.
White said her office is seeking ways to reduce risks and life-cycle costs. This includes the end-state contracting approach to accelerate cleanup by providing contractors with more flexibility and the promise of higher fees.
The Environmental Management office did not comment further.
Big Four Sites Account for Most Costs
Four sites – Hanford, INL, Savannah River, and the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee – together account for more than 80 percent of the office’s fiscal 2017 liability, the GAO said.
The Hanford Site alone accounted for $141 billion, or more than half, of the fiscal 2017 nuclear remediation liability.
A slew of individual problems also increased liability. These include delays, sometimes involving regulatory disputes; selection of different remedies that cost more than previously planned; accidents and work stoppages; technical challenges; and changes in work scope.
A few examples:
- Delays at the SRS Salt Waste Processing Facility, which has not yet begun operations, added nearly $2.7 billion in liability in 2013.
- Performance and technical issues at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant increased cost estimates by $11 billion in 2016. The facility is now expected to cost about $17 billion.
- Two incidents in early 2014 caused the DOE Waste Isolation Pilot Plant to suspend operation for about three years and increased liability $280 million in 2014.
- Technical problems with processing sludge waste at Oak Ridge in 2012 increased liability about $71 million.
- The discovery of soil contamination in an area of Hanford that was worse than first thought drove up the estimate $100 million in 2012.
- Finally, uncertainty about the Yucca Mountain geologic repository in Nevada, which would store some defense high-level waste and spent fuel, increased EM’s fiscal liability $230 million in 2016.
The new government watchdog report is one of several expected this year to study issues surrounding the DOE cleanup office, Trimble has said.
