Top management for the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office should use available information to identify the scope and cost of remediating contaminated soil and legacy landfills, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said last week.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management (EM) should also use that information to prioritize work at nuclear sites, GAO said in the Sept. 26 report.
“EM headquarters is unable to readily identify the scope, schedule, and cost of soil and legacy landfill cleanup over the 12 sites” studied by GAO, according to the report. In addition soil and landfill costs are often lumped together with other categories, such as groundwater remediation.
Better information would enable “EM headquarters, DOE, regulators, and Congress to better weigh the risks and prioritize the resources needed to meet soil and legacy landfill cleanup requirements across EM sites,” GAO said.
DOE EM neither agreed nor disagreed. The agency deferred its response regarding implementation to a later date.
The GAO selected eight EM properties, which included Hanford Site in Washington State and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and found of the eight sites, the soil and legacy landfills cost is expected to be over $15 billion over the next 60 years.
Soil and landfill work at Hanford is expected to last until 2086 and cost over $8 billion, GAO said. The Congressional watchdog based this partly on conversations with Hanford officials.
GAO acknowledged that remediation cost and schedules are affected by variables such as remedy decisions and challenges during cleanup, including unexpected contamination and technical complexity.
In contrast to headquarters, individual sites had accessible data to specific soil and legacy landfill cleanup that are available upon request, GAO said.
GAO conducted the performance audit between May 2024 and September 2025.