The Department of Energy is responsible for the overwhelming majority of the federal government’s environmental liability, which has more than doubled from $212 billion to $447 billion over the last two decades, the Government Accountability Office said Wednesday.
DOE represents 83 percent of that liability: $372 billion as of fiscal 2016; it is followed distantly by the Department of Defense at 14 percent, or $63 billion, with all other federal agencies bringing up the rear with a 3 percent, or $12 billion, liability.
The numbers are included in the GAO’s latest report on high-risk federal activities — “federal programs and operations that are especially vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement, or that need transformative change.” Federal environmental liabilities was added to this year’s list, along with the 2020 Census and federal education, health, and energy programs for American Indians.
“Agencies spend billions each year on environmental cleanup efforts but the estimated environmental liability continues to rise,” the report says. “Since 1994, GAO has made at least 28 recommendations related to this area; 13 are unimplemented.”
The DOE Office of Environmental Management (EM) has since 1989 completed remediation of 91 of 107 facilities around the nation, spending $164 billion for collection, processing, and disposal of nuclear and other dangerous wastes left behind by Cold War nuclear weapons operations, the GAO said. That includes $35 billion over the past six years. Still, the department’s environmental liability has gone from $176 billion in fiscal 1997 to $372 billion as of the last budget year; EM represents $257 billion of that, up from $163 billion two decades ago. Drilling down even further, the Hanford Site in Washington state and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina represent half of the department’s overall environmental liability.
Contributors to the growing liability figures, according to DOE, including inflation; better estimates for the scope of certain work, including updates for work that is moving faster or being pushed back; “delays and scope changes” for significant construction projects at Hanford and Savannah River; and the absence of a disposal path for high-level radioactive waste following the cancellation of the Yucca Mountain project in Nevada.