COLUMN ONE : Losing the Nuclear Waste War : Errors and inefficiency plague the government’s cleanup of deadly debris from the arms race. Even an Energy official says Murphy’s Law dogs his agency’s efforts.

Turning nuclear-bomb waste into glass logs looked like a safe and economical way to handle 35 million gallons of radioactive sludge back in 1981, when the Energy Department began designing a treatment plant in South Carolina.

But today, the sludge--so radioactive that it can kill a person in minutes--remains in underground tanks at the Savannah River nuclear weapon plant. Six years behind schedule and $1 billion over budget, the Westinghouse Corp. plant is another year away from starting up the glass melter.

The plant is an “embarrassment,” acknowledged Thomas Grumbly, environmental management chief at the Energy Department. While recent tests at Savannah River have raised his hopes that its technical defects have been fixed, Grumbly worries that further maladies may be lurking.

“Murphy walks the halls of the Energy Department,” he said, referring to Murphy’s Law, which holds that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.

The problem with the melter is emblematic of a broad legacy of mismanagement and inefficiency that has dogged efforts to clean up U.S. nuclear waste left from decades of frenetic Cold War bomb production.

From 1950 to 1990, the federal weapon complex produced, on average, more than four nuclear bombs a day, leaving behind all the waste in about 9,000 production buildings, tank farms, ponds, burial pits and other sites across the nation.

Plutonium, uranium and other radioactive poisons have contaminated the soil at thousands of spots. Even with the best environmental practices, the waste will pose a risk to health and safety for more than 10,000 years.

Despite $23 billion in government spending since 1989, the nuclear waste problem looms larger than ever and is more intractable, principally because federal bureaucrats badly miscalculated the depths of the problem at the outset. A recent General Accounting Office report lambasted the Energy Department’s performance, saying “little cleanup has resulted.”

The decontamination of old bomb plants and management of nuclear waste is by far the largest environmental program in the world, costing taxpayers $6.1 billion this year alone. In only five years, the program has mushroomed into a massive commercial undertaking but without an industrial infrastructure, contracting system or technology base to fully support the job.

In many cases, the Energy Department has tied its own hands by signing legal agreements with states and other federal agencies, which it has neither the money nor technology to meet. As a result, the department has been left open to a barrage of lawsuits that is usurping federal policy.

Colorado sued when the Energy Department couldn’t meet its cleanup schedule. Nevada sued to keep out Ohio’s radioactive dirt. South Carolina went to federal court in an effort to block a shipment of foreign fuel rods.

As matters stand, deciding which contaminated places to clean first “is being left up to courts and who has the most powerful congressional delegations and the meanest attorneys general,” said Bob Alvarez, deputy assistant energy secretary. “That is not the way we should be doing business. We have a regulatory framework that encourages this.”

A Curse on Future

The Energy Department emerged from the Cold War a master at secretly cranking out sophisticated nuclear bombs to protect America’s national security, but it was poorly equipped to protect America’s environment or to reassure a distrustful public.

Although many federal programs have well-advertised failures, the consequence of bungling the cleanup of nuclear waste looms as a potentially toxic curse on future generations. Public attention and federal commitment could atrophy before the waste is safely contained, according to government and private experts.

“We can never look our children in the eye and say we have done a great job,” said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a Washington group frequently critical of the Energy Department. “What we have done so far points in the wrong direction.”

Estimates for the total cleanup cost are rising to staggering levels--ranging from $200 billion to $600 billion. Some experts say that upcoming studies may put the cost at $1 trillion--enough to buy every American family a new car.

The Clinton Administration came into office with high hopes and an aggressive agenda to improve the process that began only during the George Bush Administration. Clinton’s commitment has won support from congressional leaders worried that the program has become unaffordable.

Studies Assailed

Grumbly is quick to acknowledge that his department has not done enough cleanup for the $23 billion spent so far--a failure he blames on a management philosophy that encouraged interminable studies of problems before any actual work could begin.

The result was “spending a whole lot of money feathering the nests of consultants and other . . . beneficiaries to the program rather than spending those dollars on the real environmental risks that we have,” he said.

Now Grumbly has promised Congress that his department will cut the cost of major projects by 20% and has already proclaimed it will exceed its 1994 cleanup goals.

The Energy Department hopes to improve efficiency by opening competition on contracts worth $31 billion and has brought in high-tech firms, such as TRW Inc. and Lockheed Corp. to apply robotics and space technology. It is ending contracts that simply reimburse firms for their billings, which created little incentive to hold down costs.

It is also adding 1,200 employees to shore up its relatively small staff of civil servants who supervise and audit cleanups. Until recently, the department’s environmental program had 1,800 employees overseeing more than 42,200 contractor employees.

The remedies, however, have had little time to show real results and strong evidence continues to mount that the cleanup is going poorly.

“We do not intend to shovel billions of dollars into this program without seeing some results,” Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), a congressional powerbroker on nuclear issues, said at a hearing last year. “To say the program has been mismanaged in prior years is . . . a vast understatement.”

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent federal agency, has issued a series of reports finding poor safety standards, lethargic action and inadequate training. In a recommendation last May, it warned of “imminent hazards” of radioactive leakage from tanks, holding basins and pipes at sites across the nation unless action is taken within 24 months.

Separately, the Congressional Budget Office has faulted the agency for investing just 7% of its budget in new technology, despite its rhetoric to the contrary. The General Accounting Office recently called the department’s decision-making process “flawed.”

At Fernald, Ohio, for example, the Energy Department wanted new management and hired a subsidiary of the Fluor Corp. But the Irvine-based firm quickly became the target of an acrimonious congressional investigation into charges that it billed taxpayers for a pricey Earth Day celebration, among other questionable spending.

Oversight Blamed

At the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, the Energy Department spent $1.5 billion on a burial pit that it cannot open because it never obtained the required regulatory charters. Authorities are still trying to determine whether the site can safely store uranium, plutonium and other wastes.

In project after project, costs are out of control. Energy Department cleanup programs have an average cost overrun of 48%, according to a study by Independent Project Analysis, a firm hired by the Energy Department last year.

Among IPA’s findings: Projects suffer from repeated changes of managers, the department has not learned from past mistakes and it has lax control over the hundreds of cleanup programs across the country.

“DOE people have been trying to manage projects from 50,000-feet altitude,” said Edward Merrow, the president of IPA. “In many projects, there was no federal employee directly responsible. . . .

“What is at stake is whether we are able to do the cleanup. Unless the costs are brought down, the cleanup will not get done. The costs will be unaffordable.”

Even when progress is made, the ultimate goals are unclear--whether it is to ensure radioactivity remains safely confined to old bomb plants or whether it is to decontaminate those plants for unrestricted use.

“If you wanted to turn the entire nuclear defense complex into green fields on which we would let our children freely roam, there might not be enough paper down in the Treasury Department, printed in any denomination, to do that now,” Grumbly said. “So, if that’s your definition of cleanup, total green fields for the whole system, then I don’t think even the $300-billion number buys that.”

A parallel problem is that nobody has agreed on what standards should be met in cleaning up sites. Even with the best technology, some sites will have residual radiation above background levels, but the Environmental Protection Agency has not been able to set safe limits.

“This is a place where as a society we do not have a consensus yet,” Grumbly said.

Sacrifice Zones

Some heavily polluted sites, dubbed by critics as national sacrifice zones, will have to be sealed off for hundreds, or possibly thousands, of years. Even now, the Energy Department is spending nearly half its environmental budget on managing and storing the waste--not on restoration.

“The federal government has created profoundly contaminated zones that we don’t have the money, resources or technology to restore to even restricted use,” said Alvarez, the Energy Department executive.

Dealing with waste that will remain radioactive for thousands of years raises deep questions. To begin with, it is unlikely that the Energy Department or even the U.S. government will exist in a few thousand years.

The department has already lost track of where some radioactive waste is buried, raising questions about how it will keep precise records for thousands of years. Even posting warning signs at polluted sites may be a challenge because linguists doubt that the present English language will be spoken in the distant future.

Congress has more immediate concerns. For the first time since the program was launched in 1989, Congress this year cut some of its funding. The Congressional Budget Office wanted to go further, proposing a $630-million cutback.

With a furor rising in Congress, the department is loath to ask for yet more money. Nonetheless, Grumbly has begun warning of a “fiscal train wreck” in which the cost of cleaning up all the nuclear waste will outstrip the ability of taxpayers to foot the bill.

Only a few years ago, Energy Department officials had projected their environmental management budget would rise to $14 billion annually by the year 2000; today the expectation is that the annual budget will rise little, if at all.

With less money than expected, it would seem more urgent than ever for the department to address the biggest problems first.

As simple as that seems, it isn’t.

The department signed about 100 legal agreements in the 1980s and 1990s with states and the federal Environmental Protection Agency to clean up heavily contaminated sites. And since then, Congress passed the Federal Facilities Compliance Act, allowing states to sue the Energy Department for noncompliance.

Legal Disputes

But the $6.1 billion in annual spending is “woefully short” of what is necessary to meet those agreements, and in many cases the government is failing, said Victor Rezendes, a key GAO watchdog. Indeed, at a House Energy and Commerce Committee hearing last year, Grumbly testified that by the year 2000, the agreements would require spending of $12 billion to $18 billion annually.

Unable to comply with its own deals, the federal government is embroiled in some nasty legal disputes. What’s more, the compliance agreements have forced the Energy Department to treat each plant as a separate program.

To comply with a deal signed in Ohio, for example, the Energy Department wants to ship 16,000 truckloads of radioactive dirt to its Nevada Test Site, triggering an acrimonious lawsuit a few months ago by Nevada officials who don’t want Ohio’s contamination.

Harry Swainson, the state’s senior deputy attorney general, said the dirt would further contaminate a 20,000-year-old aquifer running along Nevada’s eastern border that contains enough water to supply a million families for 800 years.

“We can’t shame the federal government into stopping these shipments,” Swainson fumed.

Among other problems, the dirt would be trucked through downtown Las Vegas, raising the risk that even a non-threatening incident or spill would generate horrific publicity that could maim the tourist industry, Swainson said.

In many cases, the lawsuits and the risk of suits are forcing the Energy Department to spend money in seemingly absurd ways.

The department is spending about $500,000 a year pumping water at the Savannah River plant to maintain an artificial lake--solely to comply with state regulations that have designated it as wetlands.

The pumps originally drew cooling river water for nuclear reactors, which have been shut down for years. The water is discharged into what is known as L Lake--an eyesore that has attracted fish and alligators.

By shutting the pumps, the lake would go dry and kill the fish. To comply with state regulations, the department must continue pumping 25,000 gallons of water a minute into the lake, according to a Savannah River plant spokesman.

Leaks Urgent

Meanwhile, 67 out of 177 tanks of high-level radioactive waste are leaking into the soil at the Hanford Reservation in Washington state, posing one of the more urgent contamination problems. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board has advocated quicker action in dealing with the tanks.

And at the Nevada Test Site the department has yet to conduct an environmental study of about 1,000 bomb craters left from underground nuclear tests that created serious radioactive contamination in the water table, state officials complain.

To deal with such inconsistencies, the Energy Department is attempting to renegotiate the agreements, hoping to create a more realistic cleanup schedule. Colorado Assistant Atty. Gen. Daniel Miller said his state is being reasonable, talking with other states and federal groups to find an alternative to court fights.

Nonetheless Colorado also brought an administrative complaint against the Energy Department for failing to meet a 1991 cleanup agreement at the Rocky Flats bomb plant. The department paid a $2.8-million fine last summer.

Political battles between state congressional delegations for cleanup funds are rising, said Alvarez.

“That pressure is there, and it is growing because of the amounts of money involved,” he said. “Progress is measured by how much you spend.”

But outsiders express it a different way: “It is pork, that’s the cynical way of putting it,” said Merrow, the IPA president. “Each site views getting their cleanup dollars in survival terms, and court orders help them with that survival . . . by putting pressure on headquarters to keep money flowing.”

Meanwhile, the department is hoping to improve performance with new cleanup technology, like the $2-billion glass melter in South Carolina. Although transforming waste into glass--a process called vitrification--is widely supported, the department’s approach has been controversial and costly.

If the plant works perfectly, it would run 24 hours a day and fill its 5,000th canister with the last of the sludge in 2019. But the plant has a far from perfect record.

Du Pont Bows Out

Chemical giant Du Pont & Co. started the design work in 1981 with a schedule to start operations in 1989. But after Du Pont got out of the nuclear business, the Energy Department concluded the plant had been designed to safety standards suitable for the chemical industry, not the more stringent requirements of the nuclear industry. An evaluation and redesign by Westinghouse, the new management firm, took years.

The plant’s prospects began to improve until April, 1993, when an accident revealed new flaws. During testing, the melter unexpectedly filled with water, triggering hundreds of alarms.

A resulting Energy Department investigation found that Westinghouse operators had become so accustomed to warning alarms that they failed to take appropriate action. The probe also uncovered inadequate training, poorly designed responsibilities for managers and the use of unauthorized procedures. A number of design changes were ordered as well. Westinghouse officials declined to be interviewed.

Had nuclear waste been inside the plant, it would have caused a major contamination of the building, critics charge. Drying out the melter caused a 10-month delay.

Thomas Cochran, a scientist on the Natural Resource Defense Council, criticized the design for having one melter rather than a series of smaller backup melters inside a single plant.

And the safety board has cited such inadequacies as the plant’s fire-protection system, its hazard warning system and its seismic standards.

The plant, originally estimated to cost $1 billion, will end up costing about $2 billion, not including another $2 billion in related treatment facilities.

“We could have built it cheaper,” acknowledged Mario Fiori, the Energy Department’s chief at Savannah River.

“It is academic. We need this facility. It is going to operate for 30 years, and it is a technology we are going to export to other Energy Department sites.”

Compared to the cost of the nuclear arms race, projects like the melter might even be regarded as a bargain. The United States has spent an estimated $4 trillion on nuclear bombs, missiles and command systems since World War II, said Stephen I. Schwartz, guest scholar at the Brookings Institution think tank.

A series of recent tests in which non-radioactive glass was poured from the melter were highly successful, said Steve Richardson, the chief government official at the plant.

Waste processing operations are scheduled to begin in late 1995. The Energy Department plans to store the glass logs at Savannah River only temporarily. South Carolina is adamantly opposed to permanent storage.

Eventually, the Energy Department intends to bury the logs at Yucca Mountain, Nev. In 1,000 to 10,000 years, the radioactivity in the logs would decay significantly and the problem would theoretically be gone.

In the worst fears of the most staunch environmentalists, however, such repositories could leak radioactive waste into public water supplies or, even worse, explode into a radioactive steam cloud that would annihilate life on Earth. Most experts believe that such fears are preposterous.

“The repository shouldn’t be any more dangerous than a (benign) uranium ore body,” Cochran said. “We shouldn’t make society any worse off than if we hadn’t mined an ore body to begin with.”

Nonetheless, Nevada authorities have been gearing up for a future battle to block Yucca Mountain from opening, another roadblock confronting the Energy Department’s cleanup agenda.

Swainson, the state’s senior deputy attorney general, has a suggestion for Energy Department officials on an alternative burial site for the glass logs.

“Let them bury it at the Mall in Washington,” he said.

“We get a little bitter about this.”

Keeping Nuclear Waste Safe

The search for safer ways to store radioactive waste has led to a process called vitrification, in which sludge is transformed into glass. Here’s how the process at one site is supposed to work:

1) The plant has 35 million gallons of radioactive sludge in underground tanks, left by the production of plutonium and tritium for bombs.

2) The sludge is pumped from the tanks into the defense waste processing facility. Mercury is removed and 150-pound batches of sludge are mixed with 3,500 pounds of special sand, called frit, and chemicals.

3) The mixture is fed into a smelter, where water is boiled out of the sludge. A special filtration system captures any remaining radioactive particles from the steam.

4) The melted mixture is poured into stainless steel canisters, which are sealed and loaded into a shielded transporter.

5) The cannisters, generating nearly as much heat as a 1,500-watt portable hair dryer, are lowered into concrete pits for “interim” storage.

Paying for the Cleanup

The Department of Energy will spend more than $6 billion this year cleaning up nuclear plants. Here is a list of all the plants and the costs of cleaning them up:

PLANTS IN OPERATION

Top 10 plants with the largest cleanup bills . . .

1) HANFORD RESERVATION, Richland, Wash.: $1.6 billion

2) OAKRIDGE RESERVATION. Oak Ridge, Tenn. $790 million

3) SAVANNAH RIVER SITE, Alken, S.C.: $701 million

4) DOE HEADQUARTERS*, Washington: $638 million

5) ROCKY FLATS PLANT, Golden, Colo.: $608 million

6) IDAHO NATIONAL ENGINEERING LABORATORY, Idaho Falls, Ida.: $619 million

7) FERNALD PLANT, Fernald, Ohio: $297 million

8) WASTE ISOLATION PILOT PLANT, Carlsbad, N.M.: $185 million

9) LOS ALAMOS NATIONAL LABORATORY, Los Alamos, N.M.: $180 million

10) LAWRENCE LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, Livermore, Calif.: $132 million

* Includes the salaries of all DOE employees nationwide and various technology development projects

. . . and the rest (in millions)

WEST VALLEY FACILITY, West Valley, N.Y.: $124.9

NEVEDA TEST SITE, Las Vegas: $66.0

SANDIA NATIONAL LABORATORY, Albuquerque, N.M.: $51.9

MOUND FACILITY, Mound, Ohio: $48.5

DOE ALBUQUEQUE HEADQUARTERS, Albuquerque, N.M.: $45.7

PANTEX PLANT, Amarillo, Tex.: $37.8

ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY, Argonne, Ill.: $36.4

BROOKHAVEN NATIONAL LABORATORY, Long Island, N.Y.: $26.0

BATELLE MEMORIAL INSTITUTE, Columbus, Ohio: $19.1

KANSAS CITY PLANT, Kansas City, Mo.: $13.2

PINELLAS PLANT, Largo, Fla.: $9.0

PRINCETON PLASMA PHYSICS LABORATORY, Princeton, N.J.: $8.3

ARGONNE NATIONAL LABORATORY, Idaho Falls, Ida.: $7.5

LIVERMORE NATIONAL LABORATORY, Livermore, Calif.: $6.6

RMI PLANT, Ashtabula, Ohio: $6.0

AMES LABORATORY, Ames, Iowa: $5.4

FERMI NATIONAL ACCELERATOR LABORATORY, Batavia, Ill.: $5.1

Uranium mill tailings program at mines across the country: $101.0

All other midwest sites / research centers: $21.7

CLOSED PLANTS

Colonie, N.Y.: $15.2

Maywood, N.J.: $14

St. Louis Airport (two sites): $8.1

Toledo, Ohio: $6.1

St. Louis: $3.4

Hazelwood, Mo.: $3.1

Tonawanda, N.Y.: $2.5

Middlesex, N.J.: $2.3

Wayne, N.J.: $2.3

Oxford, Ohio: $2.2

Indian Orchard, Mass.: $2.1

Lewiston, N.Y.: $1.9

Fairfield, Ohio: $1.3

Buffalo, N.Y.: $1.2

Adrian, Mich.: $1.1

Hamilton, Ohio: $.7

New Brunswick, N.J.: $.6

Beverly, Mass.: $.5

Source: Savannah River Site