Doe’s Hanford Plan Criticized Auditors Question Whether Agency Should Head Clean-Up

Tue., March 24, 1998

Associated Press

Congressional auditors took another swipe Monday at what they termed the Energy Department’s mishandling of nuclear waste at the Hanford reservation. A senator questioned whether DOE should remain in charge of the clean-up effort.

The Energy Department has no strategy in place to address radioactive wastes that are leaking out of storage tanks into the ground water and which eventually could make their way into the Columbia River, the General Accounting Office said.

Furthermore, DOE doesn’t really know what information is needed to make the proper cleanup decisions, the report said.

“This report clearly shows that DOE has been sticking its head in the contaminated sand and ignoring the growing body of scientific evidence that leakage … presents a major problem that could threaten to bring nuclear contamination into the Columbia River watershed,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said Monday.

Since the GAO launched its review last year, the DOE has announced plans to develop a strategy for the leaking wastes by October of this year. The Senate Appropriations Committee last week also approved an additional $2 million to study Hanford’s “vadose zone” - the area between the surface and the aquifer, or underground river.

But Ohio Sen. John Glenn, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, said he warned DOE six years ago that area of study was “seriously inadequate.

“After all this inexcusable delay, continued failure to plan and implement an assessment program will raise serious questions about whether DOE should remain in charge of this program,” Glenn said Monday.

The GAO said in its report that it had concluded “what outside experts have been saying for some time:

“The Department’s understanding of how wastes move through the vadose zone to the groundwater is inadequate to make key technical decisions on how to clean up the wastes at the Hanford site in an environmentally sound and cost-effective manner.”

James Owendoff, acting assistant energy secretary for environmental management, acknowledged in a response to GAO earlier this month that the potential impact of the contaminants on groundwater was of particular concern.

“There are significant uncertainties and data gaps in our understanding of the inventory, distribution and movement of contaminants in the vadose zone,” Owendoff said in a March 5 letter that the GAO included in its audit.

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