Radioactive waste at federal facilities threatens public health and the environment as a result of an extensive list of problems within the Department of Energy’s management of its nuclear facilities, according to a congressional watchdog.
The Energy Department is moving too slowly in retiring radioactively contaminated buildings and in getting rid of radioactive materials present in active plants, according to multiple reports made public in recent weeks by the Government Accountability Office. The department is also doing a poor job of monitoring the performance of its contractors in the effort.
“Seventy years of nuclear weapons production and energy research by DOE and its predecessor agencies generated radioactive waste, resulting in thousands of contaminated facilities,” the accountability office said. “Some facilities pose risks to workers near the facilities and to the environment.”
The Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which is responsible for managing nuclear weapons, identified 83 polluted buildings that will need decontamination in the next 25 years. Fifty-six of those no longer operate. Some of the inactive buildings have emitted radiation for decades.
Even so, despite increasing maintenance expenses and the threats posed to public and environmental health by the radioactive pollution, the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management, isn’t moving to eliminate the problem at any of the facilities until funding is available. The buildings may not be transferred until at least 2030.
That means lower-risk buildings already in the decontamination program are being processed ahead of higher-risk facilities.
The longer the wait, the more the buildings will deteriorate. “A 2011 EM report found that the longer facilities sit idle, the further they degrade, and the more dangerous and costly they are to maintain or dispose of,” the accountability office said.
One facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, deactivated in 1999, which will cost $14 million to decontaminate, is particularly dangerous as it is near active buildings. It is also near a wooded canyon, which, if a wildfire spread to the building, “could result in the uncontrolled release of contamination,” according to the accountability office.
Los Alamos struggles to keep contaminated materials out of its active facilities, as well. The lab spent $931 million on an incomplete project to remove a type of radioactive waste in 2014. The cost of that project has grown 20 percent since a 2006 estimate. The removal was supposed to be completed by 2012.
The project was revised in 2009 with an updated cost estimate that ranged from $848 million to $1.2 billion with a 2018 completion date, but that’s also predicted to underestimate the ultimate total spending required.
While an estimated 79 percent of the waste was removed from Los Alamos, “the remaining 21 percent includes waste buried belowground, which will be the most difficult and expensive to address,” the accountability office said.
A 2015 draft estimate under review predicts a $1.6 billion price tag and is scheduled for completion in October 2022, but even that estimate “may quickly become inaccurate due to assumptions related to funding.”
Another retired-but-still-radioactive building, Alpha-5 at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee, remains extremely dangerous. The degrading condition of the facility that was used during the Manhattan Project that produced the atomic bomb in World War II, is seen in a collapsing concrete containment roof led to a seven-fold increase in maintenance costs from 2009 to 2013.
Replacing the roof, necessary to contain radiation, is estimated at $15 million and full decontamination of the facility will cost $345 million.
Earlier this year, the Washington Examiner reported that Alpha-5 maintenance has cost $24 million since 2008. The Examiner also found that more than 370 buildings won’t be decontaminated until at least 2035.
An estimated $734 million could have been saved if disposing of the buildings had started in 2010, but the Energy Department “did not request funds to accelerate the cleanup,” congressional investigators found. Regardless, immediate action can still save hundreds of millions of dollars, they said.
Another Y-12 facility, called Beta-4, located less than a mile away from a residential neighborhood, with annual upkeep costs of more than $1.7 million and a total disposition cost of over $194 million, could spread radioactive contaminants in the event of a fire. Even water runoff from fire suppression could contain pollutants.
Y-12 and the Pantex Plant in Texas are under a single operating contract awarded to Consolidated Nuclear Security, LLC, in 2013 for more than $22 billion. The group proposed initiatives that would result in $3.27 billion in savings over the 10-year contract. But the National Nuclear Security Administration did not appropriately report the benefit or costs estimated by the contractor to Congress.
For example, investigators found that, rather than estimating cost savings each year of the contract, Consolidated Nuclear Security, at the government’s direction, assumed that sustained savings would accumulate each year.
In other words, if the contractor saved $327 million in its first year and sustained that amount for the duration of the contract, its cumulative savings would equal $3.27 billion without any additional changes.
That calculation method “may give Congress an unrealistic expectation that the contractor will attain a larger amount of new cost savings each year,” the investigators said.
The administration also didn’t explain how the contractor would achieve the savings, which raised “questions about the feasibility of attaining the $3.27 billion target,” the report said.
