Department of Energy

Changing defense requirements and tightening domestic budgets are forcing the Department of Energy (DOE) to redefine its missions and to reexamine the need for many of its inactive facilities. Cleaning up these inactive facilities can be a lengthy process, involving everything from preliminary assessments of the type and the amount of contamination in floors, walls, and ceilings to the actual removal of nuclear and hazardous materials. GAO found that DOE is in only the preliminary stages of cleaning up inactive facilities. DOE does not know the number of its facilities that are inactive but not yet transferred to its Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management, the full extent of the dangers they pose, or the cost of improving their safety until they can be decontaminated and decommissioned. DOE also lacks an accurate idea of the number of facilities it will close during the next 30 years because of changes in its missions, nor does it know how cleaning up these additional facilities could affect the program's total cost. GAO believes that given that DOE might close up to 7,000 facilities, as well as the program's potential cost, having a single office manage all work at inactive facilities may be a more effective approach to coordinating cleanups.

GAO found that: (1) DOE could not accurately estimate how many inactive facilities it will close over the next 30 years, the extent of environmental danger the facilities pose, or the impact that deactivating, maintaining, and decontaminating these facilities could have on the program's total cost; (2) many inactive facilities are in poor condition, pose a threat to cleanup workers, and need considerable deactivation work and maintenance because of past maintenance inadequacies and DOE policies that emphasized production over environmental cleanup; (3) DOE program management problems include internal differences over the criteria for transferring facilities from program offices to the Office of Environmental Restoration and Waste Management (EM) and the lack of coordination between the offices responsible for closing inactive facilities; and (4) DOE needs to consolidate its inactive facility responsibilities under a single office to increase the organizational effectiveness and coordination of cleanup activities.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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