$38-Billion Atom Waste Cleanup Planned : Environment: The Energy Department reveals a five-year strategy to remove contaminants at nuclear weapons facilities.

The Department of Energy hopes to spend as much as $38 billion over the next five years to clean up contaminants and radioactive wastes at nuclear weapons production plants across the country, agency officials said Thursday.

The new dollar estimates represent a significant increase in anticipated spending as the department shifts its emphasis from producing nuclear weapons to the daunting task of cleaning up the environment surrounding weapons facilities in 13 states.

The spending estimates were released Thursday as a part of the Energy Department’s annual update of its five-year “Environmental Restoration and Waste Management” plan.

“This is a plan, not a budget,” said Leo P. Duffy, the department’s top environmental official. But environmental groups said that the spending estimates are woefully inadequate. The department is spending about $4.4 billion during the current fiscal year on cleanup.

Officials have acknowledged that it could take 30 years to clean up many of the sites, and other facilities may remain contaminated for a century or more.

Since taking office in 1989, Energy Secretary James D. Watkins has bluntly repudiated the shoddy environmental practices tolerated by his predecessors, vowing to instill a new, more enlightened culture throughout the department.

On Thursday, Watkins said that the latest five-year plan is a reaffirmation of the department’s “commitment to clean up nuclear-related waste sites and bring its aging facilities into compliance with today’s environmental laws and regulations.”

The department now has more than 1,000 employees working on issues related to the cleanup effort--four times as many as just two years ago, Duffy said. At the Rocky Flats plant near Denver, for instance, the number of such employees has risen from 3 to 33.

In the new five-year plan, the largest anticipated expenditure--about $9.5 billion--is earmarked for the sprawling Hanford facility in Washington state, where vast waste-storage tanks are in danger of exploding and radioactive and other toxic wastes have contaminated the soil as well as ground and surface water.

The Energy Department plan would increase spending at Rocky Flats to between $886 million and $1.3 billion over the next five years.

The Savannah River complex near Aiken, S.C., would receive between $3.2 billion and $5.2 billion.

The Fernald complex in Ohio would get between $2.4 billion and $2.9 billion.

The department’s 746-page plan drew mixed reactions.

Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio), chairman of the Senate Government Affairs Committee, said in a statement that the department’s plan “is a greatly improved five-year spending plan,” but that the agency “still has . . . no real long-term cleanup strategies.”

Department officials have said that the projected 30-year cleanup effort could wind up costing $100 billion; others have argued that the final bill could be twice that.

The Natural Resources Defense Council said that the Energy Department’s anticipated spending is so short of the mark that many states and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may have to resort to legal action before the department will honor its contracts for various cleanup efforts.