Plant to Clean Up Nuclear Weapons Waste to Open

After falling six years behind schedule and going $1 billion over budget, the Energy Department is to start up a $2-billion plant in South Carolina today to process radioactive sludge left from the Cold War.

Energy officials describe the facility at Savannah River as a technology showcase, disputing critics who contend that the government has little to show for the $30 billion already spent on cleaning up nuclear weapons waste across the nation.

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary will push a button this morning to activate pumps that will begin moving the first of 35 million gallons of acidic, radioactive sludge into the plant from a series of underground tanks.

Despite all of the future doubts and the past problems, Energy Department officials said Monday that opening the Savannah River plant marks an enormous step forward for the nation in dealing with the nuclear weapons cleanup.

“This represents a major American advance in dealing with nuclear waste,” said Thomas P. Grumbly, acting undersecretary of Energy. “It represents the end of the legacy of the Cold War. It is enormously important.”

The black sludge is a byproduct of the plutonium refining process the department ran at Savannah River. The sludge--so radioactive that it can kill a nearby person in minutes--will be piped into the plant’s melter, where it will be mixed in 150-pound batches with 3,500 pounds of molten sand. The water will be boiled out of the mixture and the glass-like substance will be siphoned into stainless steel canisters 6 feet high.

The process is immensely time consuming, so much so that even if the plant works perfectly and operates 24 hours a day, it will not fill the last of the 5,000 canisters until 2028. The canisters will be stored in underground silos for several decades, until they can be transported to a permanent repository.

The plant is part of the department’s long-range effort to clean up the nation’s nuclear weapons complex--by any measure the largest environmental program in history. It will cost anywhere from $150 billion to $350 billion, according to various figures from the Energy Department and General Accounting Office. Some outside groups contend the job will ultimately reach $1 trillion.

Energy officials miscalculated the difficulty of the job from the outset, believing technical challenges could be solved with large sums of money, said Christopher Payne, an analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization. “It turned out to be wildly unrealistic.”

The staggering cost, coupled with allegations that the Energy Department had mismanaged the cleanup, has led Congress to slash the agency’s environmental budget in the past year.

At one time, the Energy Department anticipated getting $14 billion annually for the cleanup effort, but last year Congress appropriated $6 billion.

The cleanup program also has been tainted by partisan politics. Leading Republicans who wanted to eliminate the Energy Department ended up on O’Leary’s “enemies list,” compiled by an outside consultant and disclosed late last year.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-El Cajon), chairman of the national security subcommittee on procurement--among other GOP leaders who control the Energy Department budget--called for O’Leary to resign. Hunter asserted that the department is wasting nearly a third of its $6-billion budget.

Political outrage also has followed a long list of studies from the General Accounting Office, the National Research Council and other outside groups that found Energy Department programs suffer from uncommonly high cost overruns, schedule delays and shortfalls in meeting goals.

Victor Rezendes, the GAO’s top nuclear waste expert, said the Energy Department has had much larger cost overruns than it has acknowledged on the processing plant in Savannah River. Rezendes said the plant and all of the secondary facilities also used in the laborious process will end up costing about $5 billion, about five times the original projected price.

Grumbly took exception to the critics. By his calculation, which does not include any of the secondary facilities, the processing plant will cost about $1.2 billion, up from the original cost of $600 million. Moreover, he said, the cost has not grown during the three years of the Clinton administration.

Grumbly also said that the department has completed roughly 30% of the ground water and soil contamination cleanup that will be needed at former weapons sites around the country. Despite cutting 20,000 contractor jobs, Grumbly said, the agency is doing more actual cleanup work and cutting the endless studies that hobbled the program in the past.

Almost all the experts agree that the new plant seems safe, despite a legacy of troubled design and construction. The plant went through a couple of redesigns after deficiencies were found and the original designer, DuPont, was replaced by Westinghouse Electric Corp.

The independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s teams of inspectors have found no evidence that the plant threatens public safety, said Ken Pusateri, general manager of the safety board.

The Energy Department hopes to bury the canisters of processed sludge in a permanent underground repository. The only plan for such a place is at Yucca Mountain, Nev., but state officials have sued to try to block it.

“We would raise hell if they tried to move that here,” said Harry Swainston, senior deputy attorney general of Nevada. “They want to give us 300 million curies of radioactivity. It makes a lot more sense to leave it in South Carolina.”