Report Warns of Perpetual Peril at Nuclear Sites

More than 100 nuclear weapon development sites in this country will never be free enough of radioactive debris to allow unrestricted public use, and the government has failed to develop adequate plans for their long-term management, according to a scientific study released Monday.

The report, prepared by the National Research Council at the request of the U.S. Energy Department, says there is no convincing evidence that the government’s existing plans for what amounts to perpetual oversight will prove reliable or that it can guarantee permanent funding to get the job done.

The report says the department should assume that most systems it intends to use to contain radioactive waste “will eventually fail.” Moreover, it notes, “much of our current knowledge of the long-term behavior of wastes . . . may eventually be proven wrong.”

Some of the sites covered by the report are small, such as mounds of uranium mine tailings in relatively remote areas. But the list includes such sprawling facilities as the Hanford reservation in Washington state, the Oak Ridge reservation in Tennessee, the Savannah River site in South Carolina and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. And some involve severe contamination, such as underground tanks and burial sites containing high-level radioactive wastes.

Nine of the sites are in California. Although none of them is regarded as heavily polluted, none is expected to be released for unrestricted public use, either.

The National Research Council, an offshoot of the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering, provides scientific and technical advice under a congressional charter. Its report is another dose of bad news for the Energy Department, which has been plagued by recent problems including security breaches at its nuclear laboratories, electric power shortages in California and a wildfire that menaced the Los Alamos nuclear lab.

“DOE often makes a plan as if things were going to work, which don’t always work. [The department’s] planning assumption should be that things may turn out to be wrong,” said Thomas Leschine, associate professor at the University of Washington and chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “You know, a day will come when someone forgets about that pile of waste and someone else comes along to build a house on it.”

Steps Being Taken, Department Assures

Gerald Boyd, a deputy assistant Energy secretary, said the report “makes a very good point that we have to think very hard about those residual contaminants for a very long time.”

But he insisted that the department is planning a long-term strategy for monitoring the sites and will continue to review the containment strategy to see that it is effective. Even over the long term, “I don’t think there’s any chance the federal government will renege on those responsibilities,” he said.

Of 144 facilities that played a role in the U.S. nuclear weapons programs, the Energy Department has concluded that 109 will never be clean enough to permit unrestricted use by the public. The department recently created an Office of Long-Term Stewardship to indefinitely oversee those sites, located in 27 states and on Puerto Rico and Pacific islands.

At many sites, the Energy Department intends to rely on long-term surveillance, physical barriers such as fences and legal measures such as deed restrictions to protect the public and the surrounding environment from any residual contamination.

Although that would appear to be a relatively low-cost strategy, the report says there is no way to estimate the total cost of such a program because no one knows what might go wrong or how long it will have to be in place.

It says that the department has failed to consider the costs to society of containment failure, such as “aquifers becoming contaminated by residual wastes whose propensity for off-site migration was not understood at the time” active cleanup ended.

Cleanup Impossible or Too Costly at Some Sites

Since some radioactive wastes remain dangerous for several thousand years, the problem is analogous to a waste-management program established during the Roman Empire. It is unlikely that the Romans would have been able to foresee conditions in today’s world, but their waste products might still be poisoning the environment.

The report says that the reasons most sites will not be completely cleansed are “technical, social, fiscal and political.”

Leschine elaborated in a telephone interview, explaining that a complete cleanup would be impossible at some sites and considered too expensive at others.

“You lose the political will . . . to continue pouring money into the problem,” he said.

The reluctance of Congress to continue appropriating funds to clean up nuclear sites has an impact on the Energy Department’s plans to monitor facilities that remain too “hot” for normal use. Congress usually appropriates money on an annual basis, not for programs that must be maintained for millenniums.

“There is no assured funding,” Leschine said. He noted that Tennessee recently established a trust fund to pay for perpetual monitoring at Oak Ridge. But there is no way to know whether that fund will last long enough.

The report offers few specific suggestions beyond advising the department to be more flexible in its planning and to expect the unexpected.

“The best decision strategy overall appears to be one that avoids foreclosing future options where sensible, takes contingencies into account wherever possible and takes seriously the prospects that failures . . . could have ramifications that a good steward would want to avoid,” it says.

“Today’s scientific knowledge and technical and institutional capabilities are insufficient to provide much confidence that sites with residual risks will continue to function as expected for the time periods necessary.”

The California sites include the Energy Technology Engineering Center near Simi Valley, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory near San Francisco, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory near the UC Berkeley campus, the Sandia National Laboratories facility in Livermore and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center at Stanford University.