Cold War nuclear cleanup managed by the Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) is responsible for more than half of the federal government’s total environmental liability of $447 billion, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said this week.
The cost of the remaining cleanup work across DOE’s nuclear complex was estimated at $257 billion as of fiscal 2016, up more than $90 million since fiscal 2011, according to the GAO’s 2017 High Risk Report.
The Hanford Site in Washington state and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina account for 50 percent of EM’s environmental liability as of the last budget year, GAO said. The two sites house a combined 80 million or so gallons of liquid radioactive and chemical waste, and Hanford is home to a major cleanup project of former plutonium production operations.
On top of all this, GAO said, the latest cost estimate for DOE’s legacy nuclear liabilities does not include billions of dollars in expected expenses for building a permanent repository for high-level waste, and for cleaning up the Nevada National Security Site: an above-ground nuclear test site in the Cold War years.
The Energy Department did not respond to a request for comment this week.
Spending at the Office of Environmental Management as of fiscal 2016 stood at more than $164 billion since 1989 on extraction, processing, and disposal of nuclear and other wastes, the GAO said. It has completed work at 91 of 107 sites, but the remaining facilities are also the most challenging.
As an agency, DOE’s total share of the federal environmental liability — including costs unrelated to legacy nuclear-weapons cleanup — was estimated at $372 billion: 83 percent of the federal government’s total environmental liability. The next biggest contributor is the Defense Department, which made up just 14 percent of the total federal environmental liability with $63 billion in cleanup costs outstanding. All other federal agencies followed with $12 billion, or 3 percent, of the liability.
In total, the federal environmental liability has skyrocketed from $212 billion in fiscal 1997 to the latest figure of $447 billion.
The GAO lauded DOE for its “strong leadership commitment” to high-risk areas including legacy nuclear cleanup, but also said the agency’s Environmental Management Office and National Nuclear Security Administration — which manages active nuclear weapons programs — have “struggled to ensure they have the capacity (both people and resources) to mitigate risks” and consequently “demonstrated limited progress in contract management, particularly in the area of financial management, and have struggled to stay within cost and schedule estimates for some major projects.”
The matter of resources is not entirely within DOE’s control. Unless the White House directs the agency to perform programmatic triage and redirect funding from one program to another, speeding cleanup and hiring more hands will depend on the agency’s annual appropriation from Congress, which has lately kept the cleanup budget about flat at $6 billion a year.
The GAO publishes a high-risk list every two year sat the start of a new Congress. This year’s was the first list to include federal environmental liabilities.
