GAO has said that estimates of the cost of cleaning up hazardous Energy Department sites now is at least $377 billion, up by $109 billion from the previous estimate and further complicating what already is a daunting task.
Much of the work involves dealing with waste from nuclear weapons production “much of which is hazardous or radioactive,” GAO said, noting that environmental liabilities were added to its high-risk list in 2017.
Cleanup of legacy defense waste—much of it dating to Cold War programs–is annually funded through discretionary appropriations, “so difficult trade-offs will have to be made between cleanup and other nuclear-related defense spending,” it said.
One issue GAO raised is that “each of the 16 cleanup sites sets its own priorities, which makes it hard to ensure that the greatest health and environmental risks are addressed first.” Without a strategy that sets national priorities and describes how DoE will address its greatest risks, it “lacks assurance that it is making the most cost-effective cleanup decisions across its sites,” it said, citing a wide variance in expected costs for similar projects at two separate sites.
