Nuclear Waste Cleanup

GAO reported last year that a key obstacle to deploying innovative technologies to clean up nuclear waste at Department of Energy (DOE) sites has been the lack of coordination between the technology developers in DOE's Office of Science and Technology and the end users of technologies at DOE's cleanup sites. This testimony discusses DOE's progress in using the innovative technologies it has developed to clean up hazardous and radioactive contaminants at its sites. These sites present environmental and human health concerns as a result of 50 years of nuclear weapons research, testing, and production activities. Since 1990, DOE has received about $2.7 billion to develop innovative cleanup technologies and has begun more than 800 projects. However, some technologies have not met users' requirements.

GAO noted that: (1) DOE's Office of Science and Technology (OST) has begun several actions to improve coordination between technology developers and users, such as setting its priorities according to the users' stated technology needs; (2) however, OST is still not using the decision-making system it developed that requires user involvement during development and user commitment before investing in demonstrating a technology; (3) rather, OST is using elements of this system in its annual project reviews; (4) although these reviews have benefits, they are being implemented inconsistently and they may not provide enough management attention to developer and user cooperation as a technology progresses through development phases; (5) more assurance may be needed that users will ultimately deploy the technologies being pursued and that a specific go/no-go decision is made before substantial investments are made; (6) DOE cites its Accelerated Site Technology Deployment program as addressing concerns about technologies being too generic to be readily implemented at cleanup sites; (7) this program provides funding to DOE sites for their first use of an innovative technology developed by OST or other organizations; (8) however, the program funds only a limited number of projects and funding does not necessarily have to be used for modifications; (9) OST is establishing lead national laboratories for each of its focus areas to increase its level of technical expertise; (10) since OST is still defining the role of the lead laboratories, it is too early to assess the impact of this change on improving expertise; (11) furthermore, without requiring that an OST representative participate in technology selection, it is unclear whether improving focus areas' expertise alone will result in more consultations with sites; (12) OST has conducted a study that verified the deployments reported for fiscal years 1997 and 1998 and has taken several steps to improve the quality of data input; (13) however, the data being entered into OST's database continue to have a high degree of errors with only about half of the deployments being correct as listed in the database; (14) OST plans to hire consultants to help identify the causes of poor data quality and recommend improved approaches; and (15) OST plans to improve the information on vendors in its database by linking information in the database with credit of deployment.