nuclear-news

Mark Costella, a facilities manager at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, would prefer to tear down the structure, but doesn’t have the tens of millions of dollars needed.

Instead, he is spending $US500,000 ($700,000) to fix the roof.

These are the kinds of contradictions at the heart of the ­complicated, expensive and struggling effort to clean up the US’s 70-year-old nuclear weapons program.

The Energy Department’s clean-up operation is wrestling with reduced budgets, tens of billions of dollars in ballooning cost estimates and 2700 structures on its to-do list. Officials said more than 350 additional unneeded facilities controlled by other programs in the Energy Department are probably eligible for transfer to the clean-up operation. But that office said its funds were limited and it was not ­accepting any more projects, no matter their significance.

That means some of the nation’s toughest threats are now on the backburner, possibly for decades, while relatively low-­priority work moves forward.

Dirty and decaying structures where weapons work and other nuclear activities were carried out — some the size of several football fields and old enough to qualify for Social Security — are clustered in federal sites from South Carolina to California. Some are within easy walking distance of people’s homes.

Government watchdogs have started raising alarms about the stockpile of contaminated buildings, warning that some of the ­facilities pose a health risk to the public and that the cost of dealing with them will only increase the longer they remain standing. Provisions directing the administration to address the issue were included in congress’s 2016 defence bill, vetoed by President Barack Obama this month.

The clean-up work, which includes a mixture of radioactive and chemical wastes, “is the largest environmental remediation ever undertaken by mankind and the most technically challenging”, said Gregory Friedman, who this month retired as the Energy Department’s Inspector General.

One reason for the Energy Department’s struggles is a budgetary tug of war within the agency. One part of the department maintains the US’s atomic arsenal, and another is in charge of cleaning up the contamination from nuclear work. Funds for both come from the same pot, and in a shift from the 1990s, an increasing portion is going towards ensuring the readiness of the weapons ­arsenal, an Obama administration priority.

The nuclear weapons budget grew 5 per cent to $US8.2 billion in the latest fiscal year — up 23 per cent in the past decade — while the budget for clean-up was essentially flat at $US5.9bn — down 19 per cent since 2005.

Moreover, funds available to those two operations aren’t always well spent, the Government Accountability Office said. A February report by the GAO, the investigative arm of congress, tagged both the Energy Department’s weapons operation and its clean-up operation as being at high risk of fraud and waste on major construction projects. The report cited several troubled projects, including a new $US6.5bn uranium-processing facility in Tennessee for the weapons program where about $US1bn has been spent so far just on design work, including one plan that had the roof 4m too low to accommodate the equipment.

Energy Department officials acknowledged they had at times struggled to adhere to budgets and schedules on such complex projects. They also said the department was improving. When the problems arose at the Tennessee project, the department adopted a less-ambitious building plan to keep down costs, they said.

A working group appointed this year by Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz is examining what to do with contaminated buildings.

“We’re making progress on important things,” said Mark Gilbertson, a deputy assistant secretary in the Energy Department’s Environmental Management office, which oversees the clean-up operations. Still, he adds, it is difficult to take on new tasks when existing commitments require “several billion dollars more than we are getting in our budget”.

Between 2010 and 2014, the Energy Department spent over $US22bn on clean-up work. During the same period, the department’s estimated cost of the remediation work still to be done rose to $US204bn, up 20 per cent.

For decades, beginning with World War II’s Manhattan Project and through the Cold War, environmental concerns took a back seat to building bombs. “You were in a war. The priority was how much weapons material you could generate,” said Leo Duffy, who headed what is now the Environmental Management office when it was formed in 1989.

At the end of the Cold War, health concerns took centre stage. A 1991 report by the now-defunct congressional Office of Technology Assessment said that the limited data available “indicate that off-site health effects are an unproven but plausible consequence of Weapons Complex pollution”. Whether such health effects have occurred remains a debated topic.

Generally, experts say, the risk to workers or the public of radioactive and chemical contaminants leaking from the buildings is relatively low.