GAO on Paducah (DOE) Cleanup

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Nuclear Waste Cleanup: DOE Has Made Some Progress in Cleaning Up the
Paducah Site, but Challenges Remain 

GAO-04-457  April 1, 2004 

Officiai Summary 

In 1988, radioactive contamination was found in the drinking water wells
of residences near the federal government's uranium enrichment plant in
Paducah, Kentucky. In response, the Department of Energy (DOE) began a
cleanup program. In 2000, GAO reported that DOE faced significant
challenges in cleaning up the site and that it was doubtful that the
cleanup would be completed as scheduled by 2010 and within the $1.3
billion cost projection. GAO was asked to determine (1) the amount of
money DOE has spent on the site, the purposes for which it was spent,
and the estimated total costs for the site; (2) the status of DOE
cleanup efforts; and (3) the challenges GAO previously identified that
continue to be issues for DOE.

_From fiscal year 1988 through 2003, DOE spent $823 million (in 2002
dollars) at the Paducah site. Of this total, DOE spent about $372
million (45 percent) for a host of operations activities, including
general maintenance and security; $298 million (36 percent) for actions
to clean up contamination and waste; and $153 million (19 percent) for
studies to assess the extent of contamination and determine what cleanup
actions were needed. DOE currently projects that the cleanup will take
until 2019 and cost almost $1.6 billion to complete--9 years and about
$300 million more than DOE's earlier projection. The $1.6 billion,
however, does not include the cost of other DOE activities required at
the site after the plant ceases operations, including final
decontamination and decommissioning of the plant and longterm
environmental monitoring. DOE estimates these activities will cost
almost $5 billion and bring DOE's total costs at the site, including the
$823 million already spent, to over $7 billion through 2070 (in 2002
dollars). DOE has made some progress in cleaning up contamination and
waste at Paducah, but much of the work remains to be done. For example,
while DOE has removed about 4,500 tons of scrap metal, almost 50,000
tons of contaminated scrap metal remain. Similarly, while DOE's pilot
test of a new technology for removing the hazardous chemical
trichloroethene (TCE) from groundwater at the site had promising
results--removing about 99 percent of the TCE in the test zone--the
technology will not be fully implemented for more than a year. Two of
the four challenges GAO identified in 2000--DOE's plans to use untested
technology and questionable assumptions that funding for the cleanup
would increase--no longer pose the impediment to the cleanup they once
did. Two others--uncertainty over the scope of the cleanup and
difficulty obtaining timely stakeholder agreement on the cleanup
approach--are the principal challenges that remain. First, the actual
scope of the cleanup is not yet known. As a result, any additional
cleanup actions, the costs of those actions, and the time frame for DOE
to implement them are also unknown. Second, DOE and the regulators--the
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Kentucky--have had
difficulty agreeing on an overall cleanup approach, as well as on the
details of specific projects. Over time, these disagreements have
undermined trust and damaged the parties' working relationship. After
involving EPA and Kentucky early in the cleanup planning process, as it
has done successfully at other sites, DOE officials discontinued this
approach early in 2001, due in part to concerns about the growing
cleanup scope, associated costs, and that the planned actions were
excessive in relation to the risk. The result was an almost 2-year
dispute that delayed progress. This poor working relationship has also
prevented the parties from quickly reaching agreement on the technical
details of specific projects. Unless DOE and the regulators can reach
and maintain agreement on key aspects of the cleanup and quickly resolve
technical differences, progress at Paducah could continue to be plagued
by delays.

For the original posting and a link to the entire report, see
http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/details.php?rptno=GAO-04-457

-- 


Lenny Siegel
Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
c/o PSC, 278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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