The DOE's dirty laundry: is a technologically unqualified DOE sabotaging its own nuclear cleanup efforts?

Washington Monthly, March, 1997 by Simon Walsh

Remember the savings and loan bailout? You know, the banking fiasco with the $90 billion price tag? Well, that'll look like chump change next to the government's next big repair job: reversing 50 years of environmental ruin in the nation's nuclear weapons complex. Cleaning it up is expected to take at least 75 years and $230 billion--more than twice what the S&L debacle has cost so far.

It's not a pretty picture. Radioactive waste oozes from crumbling, million-gallon tanks--some in danger of exploding--at two dormant federal reactors, Hanford in Washington state and Savannah River in South Carolina. At Fernald, a derelict nuke plant near Cincinnati, there are silos crammed with red-hot uranium tailings. At Rocky Flats, a defunct warhead factory in the suburbs of Denver, the ground is spiked with plutonium. And just outside Idaho Falls, people go to sleep at night worrying about the radioactive waste buried under the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. It has a half-life of several thousand years.

This is the price we have yet to pay for winning the Cold War. We built a lot of nukes. We built them fast. And we didn't worry about keeping things tidy. The resulting clean-up problems are among the toughest on earth. In many cases, the tools and techniques needed to make things right haven't been invented.

Given that, it's a bit discouraging to hear some of the stories coming out of the Department of Energy, the federal agency directing the clean-up. They suggest the DOE lacks the scientific savvy to get the job done.

In 1993, for instance, a worker at Hanford used a "rock on a rope" to clear a drain clogged with radioactive gunk, according to a report from the General Accounting Office (GAO). The worker contaminated himself and brought pollution sampling at Hanford to a virtual halt for half a year. At another plant, a worker opened a fan housing in a ventilation duct and inhaled a blast of plutonium dust. In still another, supervisors put lunch rooms in radiologically-controlled zones.

The problem isn't limited to the rank-and-file. A third of the DOE's 44 top-level managers responsible for protecting workers from radiation--jobs that require a technical degree in the private sector--lack any scientific degree whatsoever, according to John Crawford Jr., a nuclear engineer and recently-retired member of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal panel that monitors safety at the DOE's nuclear weapons plants. They either have a bachelor's degree in a non-technical major or no college degree at all. "This is a problem that urgently needs attention," Crawford says. "You can't be an effective performer unless you know what you're doing"

Crawford is not the first to express concern:

1989: An advisory committee on nuclear safety warned that DOE decision-makers were frustrated by "buffers of people who are not technically competent"

1991: Then Energy Secretary James Watkins warned President George Bush that the "technical knowledge and skills of many DOE managers and employees are not sufficient to do their jobs"

1993: The Office of Technology Assessment said the DOE's environmental restoration unit "has little capacity to assess contractors' performance in health and safety matters"

1996: The GAO fretted that technical problems at the DOE's Hanford site "have gone uncorrected for considerable periods, either because managers were unaware of the problems or because they were slow to take action on problems they knew about"

In February of last year, a special committee of the National Research Council rated the DOE's cleanup effort below average at best. The performance of the DOE's Office of Environmental Restoration, the committee said, "falls short, not only of the ideal, but of the standard of reasonable effectiveness set by other organizations in both the public and private sectors"

In the DOE's defense, the cleanup problems it faces today were a half century in the making. Department officials wince just thinking about the weapons plants built in the '40s, when the work was done in extreme haste, with little regard for the environment. Back then, American leaders thought Germany was on the verge of building the world's first atomic bomb. President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the Manhattan Project, convening the nation's best scientists and giving them virtually free rein to do as they saw fit--as long as they built the A-bomb first. The government paid staggering sums to build reactors and bombs at breakneck speed, and eventually won the race.

After the war, the Atomic Energy Commission inherited the Manhattan Project plants, many already falling apart, their grounds badly polluted. These plants wound up inside the DOE after its founding in 1977.

For years the department relied on the technical prowess of its hired contractors, often limiting itself to administrative duties. This approach worked fine at first, mainly because the DOE didn't have to worry about complying with environmental laws. It said making the nukes was an issue of national security, which took precedence over everything else.