$18 Billion already spent; yet nuclear waste cleanup still lagging
WASHINGTON—After spending $18 billion over two decades, the government's struggle to clean up highly radioactive waste from years of nuclear bomb production is still behind schedule with no assurance a new strategy for quicker cleanup will succeed, congressional investigators said Thursday.
| mindfully.org note: If the the GAO and DOE were to tell the truth, they would have to say that nuclear waste can't be contained, and therefore, it can't cleaned up. Instead of wasting even more taxpayer money on useless studies that only show a highly flawed financial accounting of the cleanup process, they should close down all facilities that produce nuclear waste and/or pollution immediately. |
The General Accounting Office, in a report presented at a House hearing, said that while the Bush administration's attempts to reduce costs and speed up cleanup were laudable, the program relies on untested technologies and procedures, and faces potentially crippling legal challenges.
The Energy Department's top official overseeing the environmental cleanup effort, Jesse Roberson, acknowledged that legal challenges to the program could cause problems, but insisted that the cleanup effort is being tested adequately to assure an "80 percent confidence of success."
"We are at a turning point for this program. We must not lessen our resolve," Roberson told the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee.
Officials and scientists have been perplexed for years over how to deal with the highly radioactive waste that has accumulated at Energy Department nuclear weapons sites -- especially Hanford in Washington, Savannah River in South Carolina and at the INEEL facility in Idaho.
Some of the material, left over from a half-century of plutonium production for nuclear bombs and other weapons activities, will remain deadly for thousands of years. In some cases, such as with the wastes in dozens of metal tanks at Hanford, scientists have no clear idea what's in the soup of chemicals because of poor record-keeping over the Cold War years.
The cleanup effort "has been estimated to cost nearly $105 billion and take decades to complete," the GAO report said. Much of the waste, including plutonium and highly enriched uranium, is in concentrations that will require permanent isolation from the environment either on site or at a central repository.
"After investing more than 20 years and about $18 billion, DOE acknowledged . . . that the program to clean up its high-level waste was far behind schedule, far over budget and in need of major change," the GAO's Robin Nazzaro told the subcommittee. Since then, the Energy Department has embarked on a program to reduce costs and quicken waste disposal.
However, she continued, the GAO has concerns about the success of these programs, noting the DOE already has scaled back its cost savings from an original estimate of $34 billion to $29 billion. "Our assessment of the revised estimate indicates that (the cost savings) may not be reliable," Nazzaro said, summarizing the auditing agency's report.
A particular challenge is disposal of 94 million gallons of untreated high-level waste that has been stored for years in metal -- sometimes corroding -- tanks at the Hanford, Savannah River and Idaho facilities.
"This waste would fill an area the size of a football field to a depth of about 260 feet," according to the GAO report.
Rep. Jim Greenwood, R-Pa., the subcommittee chairman, said in 1996 the Hanford tank cleanup was estimated to cost $3.2 billion. This year the cost was estimated at $5.8 billion "and the project is 10 months behind schedule."
Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., whose district is downstream on the Columbia River from the Hanford waste tanks, said his constituents are skeptical about DOE cleanup assurances. In the past "they have not always been telling the truth," he said.
The new Energy Department plan is to separate the most highly radioactive material at Hanford and the other sites, and ship it to an underground disposal site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, once that repository gets built. The rest, after separation, would be treated and buried on site in the three states.
But a federal judge has already ruled against the department's attempt to reclassify some of the waste to allow it to be buried on site.
Roberson acknowledged concern about the legal challenges and that the department is considering asking Congress to rewrite the law governing the disposal of nuclear waste to clarify that -- as the DOE currently believes -- some of the waste may be separated and be kept on site.
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