Radioactive and chemical contamination threaten both the public and the environment because of more than 370 deteriorating, unnecessary, polluted Department of Energy buildings — and the agency says it doesn’t have the money to make them safe.
The buildings on the list, many of which are old and haven’t been used in a while, include 1940s and ’50s-era buildings where nuclear research and work was performed, such as structures at the Y-12 plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., the one-time “secret city” that helped birth the Manhattan Project, and others at Los Alamos, N.M., and the Lawrence Livermore and Argonne national laboratories.
“Almost 50 percent of these facilities are more than 50 years old and are becoming dangerous,” the department’s inspector general reported last week. “Several of the facilities are in such disrepair that maintenance and nonessential utilities are limited or discontinued, and access by workers has been prohibited.”
The Department of Energy first compiled its list of polluted, unnecessary buildings six years ago. A few dozen have been decommissioned or deactivated by the agency since then, but 234 remain on the list as recently as last September and have no timetable for being cleaned up, the inspector general said in a report last week. And more than 140 others aren’t on that list but have been identified as having similar problems, the inspector general’s office said.
In response to the internal watchdog’s report, the agency says it will form a working group to develop a process to decide which buildings should be decontaminated first. DOE did not return a reporter’s phone calls or an email requesting further comment Monday.
The problems in the buildings range “from failures in critical structural components to high levels of contamination,” the report said. “Additionally, several of these facilities posed significant health and safety risks to department employees and the public.”
The facilities are contaminated with dangerous elements such as uranium, which have seeped into the soil and groundwater.
For example, the Alpha 5 building at the Y-12 plant in East Tennessee, which was built in 1944 and hasn’t been used since 2005, is still contaminated with uranium, mercury and beryllium.
Among numerous structural problems, the leaky roof has worsened over the years, allowing in rainwater that then spread the contaminants, the inspector general said, as well as creating “the potential for an explosion or reaction associated with remaining contaminants.”
Another site, the B280 Pool Type Reactor at California’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, built between 1956-57, ceased operations in 1980 and was approved for demolition eight years ago. The facility is still standing.
Cracks in the shield surrounding its reactor were observed in 2010, which could allow contamination to spread. The necessary work to fix the crack would have been too expensive.
“Budget realities” and “the unstable nature of the budget process” halted all the facilities’ decontamination process, according to DOE officials.
In fact, because of such troubles, the department predicted seven years ago that no facilities would begin decontamination before 2017. However, it has since delayed the process until 2025, or possibly even 2035.
“The longer these facilities remain unaddressed, the further they degrade, and the more dangerous and costly they are to maintain or” dispose of, the report said.
Money was instead spent on “individual program risks and priorities instead of on the highest risk that exists on a department-wide basis,” the report said.
More than $380 million was spent on operating and maintaining 234 of the facilities since 2008. More than $24 million in such costs was spent during that time on Alpha 5 alone.
Subsequently, the facility still “degraded at an alarming rate,” the report said.
This isn’t the first time the inspector general has criticized DOE over the buildings. A 2002 report found that the department hadn’t satisfactorily disposed of the unnecessary buildings and that it hadn’t fully considered risks and costs when deciding what projects should be funded.
Congress, in response to a related 2011 report, directed a department official to report on how DOE was determining which buildings should be addressed first.
However, officials “have been unable to provide us with information as to whether this briefing occurred,” the new report said.
