GAO NUCLEAR WASTE RECOMMENDATIONS PROMPT FEARS OF PRECEDENT

GAO NUCLEAR WASTE RECOMMENDATIONS PROMPT FEARS OF PRECEDENT
27 October 2009
Defense Environment Alert
DEFA, Vol. 17, No. 22

Copyright (c) 2009 Inside Washington Publishers. All Rights Reserved. Also available in print and online as part of http://www.insideepa.com/.

Environmentalists are expressing concerns over recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) recommendations for the Department of Energy (DOE) to reevaluate whether the planned scope of a key nuclear waste cleanup is necessary and required by law, saying it could set a negative precedent for radioactive cleanups around the country.
But DOE is disputing certain aspects of GAO's recommendations, a move that is stopping the suggestions from prompting immediate concerns among EPA and state regulators, one source familiar with the issue says.
At issue is a Sept. 30 report GAO issued relative to the Hanford site, a former Manhattan Project nuclear weapons facility in Washington state that is considered one of the largest nuclear waste cleanup sites in the world. The site's cleanup has been plagued by years of delays, cost overruns and disputes between DOE, regulators and environmentalists. The report, titled Uncertainties and Questions about Costs and Risks Persist with DOE's Tank Waste Cleanup Strategy at Hanford, deals primarily with DOE's efforts to clean up hundreds of leaking underground nuclear waste storage tanks.

The report suggests that legal uncertainties exist regarding "whether DOE can treat and dispose of some tank waste as other than high-level (highly radioactive) waste and how much residual waste can be left in the tanks when they are eventually closed." GAO also claims "DOE has not systematically evaluated whether its tank waste cleanup strategy is commensurate with risks posed by the wastes."
For these reasons, the report makes several recommendations, including that DOE should "consider seeking congressional clarification about reclassifying its high-level tank waste" and "work with regulators to demonstrate, on a tank-farm basis, the feasibility of leaving varying amounts of residual waste in tanks at closing without threatening human or ecological health."

The recommendations are prompting concerns among environmentalists, who argue that classifying the waste in the Hanford tanks as anything other than high-level waste is a violation of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. Treating the waste as if it is not as dangerous as high-level waste could set a negative precedent leading to a potentially broad erosion of cleanup standards at DOE nuclear waste cleanup sites around the country, an attorney with the group Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says.
"If DOE can get away with treating cesium and strontium" at Hanford as something other than highly radioactive waste "they would be setting a bad precedent for how they treat other" radioactive waste, the NRDC lawyer says.
Washington state environmentalists have been highly critical of the GAO recommendations, and are particularly concerned by what they say are suggestions in the report that could lead to DOE abandoning up to 15 percent of high-level waste in the Hanford tanks. "The [10] percent of the waste in the bottom, which is typically highly concentrated with thick sludge and hard crusts, has as much as [25] percent of all the radiation in the tanks, including much of the waste that poses the greatest risk," the group Heart of America Northwest argues in a statement on the report.
According to GAO, DOE itself "believes that waste in 11 single-shell tanks, nearly 1.5 million gallons (of about 56 million gallons of waste at Hanford), can be treated and disposed of as transuranic, rather than high-level waste." However, the report notes that in the past, "EPA raised doubts as to whether the waste qualified as transuranic waste. . . "
EPA and state regulators are not yet alarmed by the GAO report, however, in part because DOE in its response to the report disagrees with some of the recommendations, a source familiar with the issue says. For example, DOE disagreed with GAO's recommendation that it should seek clarification from Congress about its authority to reclassify high level waste. Relevant documents are available on InsideEPA.com.
In addition, the issue of how much waste can be left in the tanks is one that has already been discussed for years prior to the GAO recommendations, the source notes, adding that the Tri-Party Agreement between EPA, DOE and Washington state relative to the site already lays out a process by which DOE could seek exemptions from the currently agreed upon goal of removing 99 percent of the waste from the tanks, the source notes. -- Douglas P. Guarino
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