Department of Energy

National Priorities Needed for Meeting Environmental Agreements Gao ID: RCED-95-1 March 3, 1995

From the 1940s, when the United States began to develop nuclear weapons, through the late 1980s, the government gave little attention to the environmental consequences of its activities. As a result, many Energy Department (DOE) sites are now contaminated with radioactive and hazardous wastes, and DOE faces the largest, most, complex cleanup in the country--estimated to cost up to $1 trillion. Although DOE received more than $23 billion between 1989 and 1993 to clean up contamination at the nuclear weapons complex, the agency has yet to actually complete the cleanup of a major facility. DOE's progress has been impeded by unrealistic agreements with the Environmental Protection Agency and the states to bring the facilities into compliance with federal environmental laws. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Nuclear Weapons Complex: Establishing a National Risk-Based Strategy for Cleanup, by Bernice Steinhardt, Associate Director for Energy and Science Issues, before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. GAO/T-RCED-95-120, Mar. 6, 1995 (15 pages).

GAO found that: (1) DOE has focused on collecting data and investigating sites, rather than the actual cleanup of sites; (2) DOE has only put a small amount of effort into physically cleaning up its nuclear weapons complex and has yet to complete the cleanup of a major facility; (3) although DOE is improving its timeliness, it missed over 20 percent of the milestones it agreed to complete through 1994; (4) DOE is likely to fall further behind schedule as funding tightens, costs increase, and more milestones come due; (5) DOE has had difficulty meeting some milestones because it signed unrealistic agreements with regulators; (6) DOE has been unable to renegotiate milestones due to past delays in meeting its commitments; and (7) future progress of DOE cleanup activities depends on the adoption of a national risk-based strategy that will maximize the limited resources available for cleanup.

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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