Weapons Plant Cleanup Put at $100 Billion

Cleaning up the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons production plants may cost as much as $100 billion and will pose a major challenge for the federal government, a House panel was told on Thursday.

J. Dexter Peach, an assistant comptroller general of the U.S. General Accounting Office, said government compliance with hazardous-waste laws at the facilities has been slow and that agencies still have not been able to estimate the full extent of the problem.

Meanwhile, the New York Times in today’s editions quoted Energy Department officials as saying the department would sharply scale back the amount of radioactive material it plans to bury in the nation’s first permanent nuclear waste repository.

Plans Scaled Back

Department engineers said in interviews with the newspaper that the department would entomb in the $700-million repository in New Mexico less than a quarter of the 125,000 barrels of plutonium-contaminated wastes the government intended to place there over the next five years.

The decision came four months after scientists told a congressional committee that enough water was seeping into the repository to threaten its ability to safely store wastes that would remain radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.

Last week, a panel of experts from the National Academy of Sciences confirmed that water was entering the chamber and recommended that the Energy Department entomb only enough waste for experiments to determine the significance of the seepage.

The water leaks are to be studied further to determine whether current plans for the repository to receive even more waste can be put into effect. The repository is being dug from salt beds 26 miles east of Carlsbad, N.M., and is to open next October.

Costs ‘Quite Staggering’

In testimony to the House Energy and Commerce hazardous materials subcommittee, Peach said the magnitude of the cleanup costs at the nation’s nuclear weapons plants is “quite staggering” and will likely run into the tens of billions of dollars.

Joseph Salgado, undersecretary at the Energy Department, told the panel that $100 billion in cleanup costs for all of the federal facilities “is probably in the ballpark.”