A recent federal report found the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Environmental Management (EM) office can’t easily identify how much it will cost or how long it will take to clean up contaminated soil and landfills at 12 of the 15 sites it manages, even though data that could support those efforts is available.

The report, issued in September by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), specifically looked at eight of the 12 sites, including the Hanford site, which are currently estimated to take the next 60 years and $15 billion to remediate.

Federal auditors from the agency even visited Hanford, the most significant project in EM’s portfolio, to tour cleanup operations and meet with EM officials.

Wide variations across sites

The report acknowledged conditions, goals and community expectations for cleanup efforts vary widely across all the sites. However, with costs for some projects varying as much as hundreds of millions of dollars, GAO said DOE’s EM office should better avail itself of the detailed data on the contaminated soils and landfills that site-based officials collect.

“EM has the opportunity to enhance its technical and policy support to EM sites and potentially improve management and prioritization decisions by collecting and using scope, schedule and cost information on soil and legacy landfill cleanup,” the report said. “Such information would enable EM headquarters, DOE, regulators and Congress to better weigh the risks and prioritize the resources needed to meet soil and legacy landfill cleanup requirements across EM sites.”

DOE’s EM oversees 15 active cleanup sites around the country, with 12 having remaining soil and legacy landfill cleanup needs. All told, those 12 sites have 40 million cubic meters – enough to fill 40 Empire State Buildings – of contaminated soil and debris.

As of fiscal year 2024, DOE reported environmental liabilities of $544 billion, of which more than $417 billion was earmarked for EM’s cleanup, making it the largest environmental cleanup program in the world.

GAO conducted its audit of soil and legacy landfill cleanup at EM sites over the past 16 months. Along with meeting with EM officials based at three sites and in Washington, D.C., auditors reviewed the various laws and regulations governing cleanup activities; agreements with states, tribal governments and other entities; past and current documents on scope, schedule and costs for cleanup at each site; and other site-specific factors that could impact cleanup decisions and expense.

Hanford cleanup

Hanford looms large in EM’s cleanup efforts. GAO estimated in its report that soil and legacy landfill cleanup at the former plutonium processing site to take until 2086 with estimated costs of $6.5 billion to $8 billion.

Hanford officials told GAO that in the next decade, cleanup remedies need to be made for 16 of the 26 areas with remaining cleanup scope and that costs could change.

However, those costs are for soil remediation and legacy landfill cleanup only and do not include the costs associated with treating the millions of gallons of waste stored in underground tanks at Hanford nor groundwater contamination.

A DOE report released in April estimated it will cost between $364 billion to $589.4 billion to fully complete the cleanup and take until fiscal year 2086, with long-term stewardship stretching until 2100, though that won’t be the end. 

“The federal government plans to have a presence at the Hanford site well beyond FY 2100,” that report’s executive summary stated. 

The complexity of cleanup at sites such as Hanford means information and data on those efforts are often provided in aggregate to EM headquarters, GAO noted.

“Officials said these are combined because they generally occur near the end of a cleanup project. However, these activities are often on very different time frames,” GAO’s report stated. “Aggregating groundwater projects with soil projects makes it difficult for headquarters to understand the specific timelines for each aspect of cleanup scope that is being addressed complex-wide.”

Full information lacking

EM also over relies on site-specific project prioritization lists to identify cleanup timelines, scope and costs.

“Without information at the headquarters level specifically on the scope, schedule, and cost of soil and legacy landfill cleanup at EM sites, EM cannot effectively implement its risk-informed approach nationwide,” the report stated.

“Specifically, EM does not have full information to provide Congress to inform the allocation of resources for soil and legacy landfill cleanup for each site relative to other priorities or cleanup efforts at other sites. Relying on site-specific prioritization decisions may yield suboptimal investments of taxpayer resources – potentially allocating resources to relatively lower risk soil remediation activities at certain sites compared to those at other sites that may pose greater risks.”

GAO recommended that EM collect information specific to the scope, schedule and cost of soil and legacy landfill cleanup and use it to enhance its support provided to cleanup sites and inform cleanup priorities. According to the report, “EM neither agreed nor disagreed with the recommendation and deferred its response regarding implementation to a later date.”