Jeremy L. Dillon
RW Monitor
4/17/2015
Two of the companies partially responsible for paying for the cleanup at the Shallow Land Disposal Area in Armstrong County, Pa., are questioning how the Army Corps of Engineers listed remedial alternatives in its proposed Record of Decision Amendment. The Corps issued a proposed ROD for the site earlier this year in which the estimated cost of cleanup jumped to $350 million under an increased 46 month timeline, up from an initial estimate of $45.5 million and 26 months. The Atlantic Richfield Company and Babcock & Wilcox Government and Nuclear Operations alleged in its comment on the proposed ROD that the Corps failed to fully consider other alternatives that could keep costs down, according to their combined comments, released by the Corps last week. “Although USACE now expects the SLDA remedy to cost nearly ten times what it originally anticipated, the [Feasibility Study Addendum] and RODA do not provide a substantive and meaningful evaluation of remedial alternatives,” the companies said.
The companies added: “Moreover, the FSA and RODA are so devoid of detail that we have been unable to ascertain the specific facts which underlie USACE’s general assertions that changed procedures will result in an increase in remedy costs by nearly an order of magnitude. To ensure selection of an appropriate remedy and to satisfy the requirements of the National Contingency Plan, the FSA and RODA must reflect a genuine, thorough, and open re-evaluation of remedial options for the SLDA rather than simply affirming an excavation remedy that now appears to pose significant additional implementation challenges.”
The companies cited the Corps legal responsibility under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) as basis for their complaints. Under CERCLA, the Corps is required to consider all of the alternatives to cleaning up the site. “The current FSA and RODA fall short of the requirements of CERCLA and the National Contingency Plan. The FSA and RODA should be revised and reissued after a thorough and substantive evaluation of remedial alternatives consistent with CERCLA and the NCP has been conducted,” the companies said. They added, “The FSA and RODA are insufficient –both legally and practically—for a remediation of any scale, but fall particularly short of the mark here, where the remedy may turn out to be one of the larger remedies undertaken pursuant to FUSRAP.”
The SLDA site is one of the larger projects in the Corp’s Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP). According to the recently released proposed ROD, the cost of the cleanup increased after the government halted the project in 2011. FUSRAP said it suspended the work then after the on-site contractor deviated from the Corps’ material-handling procedures, and that a large amount of unanticipated complex material was found on site. A Nuclear Regulatory Commission Inspector General report from last year revealed that the Corps’ remediation plan for the SLDA site “grossly underestimates” how much radioactive material remains on site while a lack of documents inhibits the government’s ability to know exactly what is buried on site.
