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OVERVIEW
The Department of Energy (DOE) is responsible for cleanup and closure1 at over 140 contaminated sites in the United States. These sites are part of the legacy of nuclear-weapons production during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Contamination at many of these sites will continue to pose hazards that make unrestricted access unacceptable and thus entail management burdens into the indefinite future. DOE calls its activities beyond closure of contaminated sites “long-term stewardship” (LTS).2 While DOE is exploring the possibility of handing off LTS responsibilities to another agency, it currently seems likely that DOE will remain the steward at most closed sites.3
The Committee on Long-Term Institutional Management of DOE Legacy Waste Sites: Phase 2 was formed by the National Research Council at DOE’s request to
1
“Cleanup/remediation is considered complete when deactivation or decommissioning of all facilities is complete, excluding long-term surveillance and monitoring; releases to the environment have been cleaned up in accordance with agreed-upon standards; ground water contamination has been contained, or long-term treatment or monitoring is in place; nuclear materials and spent fuel have been stabilized and/or placed in safe long-term storage; and “legacy” wastes (i.e., produced by past nuclear weapons production activities, with the exception of high-level waste) have been disposed of in an approved manner” (DOE 2002a).
2
In its Long-Term Stewardship Study (DOE 2001a) DOE uses the following definition from the 1998 Settlement Agreement that prompted DOE’s efforts on LTS. “[LTS comprises] the physical controls, institutions, information and other mechanisms needed to ensure protection of people and the environment at sites where DOE has completed or plans to complete ‘cleanup’ (e.g., landfill closures, remedial actions, removal actions, and facility stabilization). This concept of long-term stewardship includes, inter alia, land-use controls, monitoring, maintenance, and information management” (DOE 2001a).
3
David Geiser (director, DOE Office of Long-Term Stewardship) stated that DOE is now less hopeful that another entity will take over LTS for DOE because of resistance by the potential recipients of the program (Geiser 2002). The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will take over some duties at Rocky Flats, but DOE retains LTS responsibilities for residual hazards at the site. An alternative is to create a separate entity to carry out the LTS mission. Secretary of Energy Abraham has announced a proposal to create a DOE Office of Legacy Management, which will handle DOE’s LTS mission and the missions of the current Office of Worker and Community Transition (ECA 2003). This proposal is described in the FY2004 Budget Request.
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OVERVIEW
The Department of Energy (DOE) is responsible for cleanup and closure1 at over 140 contaminated sites in the United States. These sites are part of the legacy of nuclear-weapons production during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Contamination at many of these sites will continue to pose hazards that make unrestricted access unacceptable and thus entail management burdens into the indefinite future. DOE calls its activities beyond closure of contaminated sites “long-term stewardship” (LTS).2 While DOE is exploring the possibility of handing off LTS responsibilities to another agency, it currently seems likely that DOE will remain the steward at most closed sites.3
The Committee on Long-Term Institutional Management of DOE Legacy Waste Sites: Phase 2 was formed by the National Research Council at DOE’s request to
1
“Cleanup/remediation is considered complete when deactivation or decommissioning of all facilities is complete, excluding long-term surveillance and monitoring; releases to the environment have been cleaned up in accordance with agreed-upon standards; ground water contamination has been contained, or long-term treatment or monitoring is in place; nuclear materials and spent fuel have been stabilized and/or placed in safe long-term storage; and “legacy” wastes (i.e., produced by past nuclear weapons production activities, with the exception of high-level waste) have been disposed of in an approved manner” (DOE 2002a).
2
In its Long-Term Stewardship Study (DOE 2001a) DOE uses the following definition from the 1998 Settlement Agreement that prompted DOE’s efforts on LTS. “[LTS comprises] the physical controls, institutions, information and other mechanisms needed to ensure protection of people and the environment at sites where DOE has completed or plans to complete ‘cleanup’ (e.g., landfill closures, remedial actions, removal actions, and facility stabilization). This concept of long-term stewardship includes, inter alia, land-use controls, monitoring, maintenance, and information management” (DOE 2001a).
3
David Geiser (director, DOE Office of Long-Term Stewardship) stated that DOE is now less hopeful that another entity will take over LTS for DOE because of resistance by the potential recipients of the program (Geiser 2002). The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will take over some duties at Rocky Flats, but DOE retains LTS responsibilities for residual hazards at the site. An alternative is to create a separate entity to carry out the LTS mission. Secretary of Energy Abraham has announced a proposal to create a DOE Office of Legacy Management, which will handle DOE’s LTS mission and the missions of the current Office of Worker and Community Transition (ECA 2003). This proposal is described in the FY2004 Budget Request.
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analyze long-term institutional management4 plans and practices for a small group of representative DOE legacy waste sites and to recommend improvements. (See Appendix A for the full statement of task and Appendix B for brief biographies of the committee members.) The committee selected the first two sites for its data-gathering meetings, Fernald and Mound. The third site visit, to the uranium mill tailings pile and surrounding land at the Moab Site, was part of a congressionally mandated study that was added to the committee’s original effort. The committee issued a report addressing issues at Moab in June 2002 (NRC 2002a), as requested by Congress. Appendix C lists the presentations, discussions, and tours that were part of the committee’s public meetings.
In July 2002, the assistant secretary of energy for environmental management, Jessie Roberson, requested that the study be wrapped up in advance of its planned October 2003 completion date. Following consultation with the committee and deliberations concerning the request, the Board on Radioactive Waste Management, which oversees the committee’s work, asked the committee to end its information-gathering activities and to prepare a status report based on its work to date (see Appendix D) with the understanding that the committee would therefore be limited in its ability to address fully the statement of task.
The report addresses the task statement by developing lessons that could be learned from the sites it visited and the documents it reviewed, focusing on high-level issues related to improving planning and implementation of LTS at DOE legacy waste sites:
what LTS is;
what it means to incorporate LTS in all phases of environmental management;
DOE’s need for a discussion of values and principles for decision making, so as to
enable DOE to pursue its unfamiliar responsibilities in LTS, instead of being limited by its current emphasis on compliance with existing regulations. That emphasis hinders DOE’s ability to fulfill its LTS obligations.
Public participation, trust, and confidence are essential elements of success for DOE, and are also a discussed in this report. A description of the committee’s observations from the site visits can be found in Appendix E.
Individual members of the committee are familiar with environmentally hazardous sites both within the DOE complex and outside it. The report is based on what the
4
Long-term institutional management (LTIM) is a term coined by the National Research Council committee that preceded this one. LTIM is an approach to planning and decision making that balances the use of measures available to site managers in protecting public and worker health and safety, and the environment: contaminant reduction, contaminant isolation, and long-term stewardship (NRC 2000a).
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committee has found in visiting three DOE sites, reviewing documents relevant to LTS at these three and other DOE sites,5 and engaging in discussion with DOE staff and others.
BACKGROUND
For fifty years following the beginning of the Manhattan Project in 1942, the U.S. government produced and processed nuclear materials for the nation’s defense. The industrial complex built for this effort was assembled in haste during World War II, took its mature form before environmental awareness and regulations were in place in the 1970s, and produced substantial waste and contamination at well over a hundred sites (see Figure 1) (Crowley and Ahearne, 2002).
During the decades of the Cold War the Atomic Energy Commission and its successors, the Energy Research and Development Administration and DOE, made many choices with respect to waste storage, waste disposal, routine emissions, and operations that shaped the hazards that remain at sites across the complex. These hazards, in turn, created some of the LTS problems and framed the options for dealing with them. For example, it is infeasible to relocate for disposal much of the waste that was injected underground or has leaked into the soil at Hanford because it is now contamination in the subsurface rather than discretely contained waste. These choices distributed costs and risks across geography and between present and future generations, often with limited understanding of their long-term implications for humans and the environment.6 DOE and its predecessors have been making choices with serious LTS implications for a long time. Those choices were made implicitly, as part of decisions about our national defense program. The current DOE remediation and site management program is different: Its decisions center on allocations of costs and risks, without being subordinated to another mission. The combination of current technological capabilities and funds for cleanup leave little doubt, however, that many of the contaminated sites cannot be cleaned up enough to permit unrestricted human access. Some of the remaining hazards are likely to pose significant risks indefinitely.
Contaminants are found in buildings, equipment, surface and subsurface materials, surface water, ground water, flora, and fauna. Some contaminated materials can be removed to disposal facilities specifically selected and designed to isolate chemical and radioactive wastes or they can be removed and remediated by treatment; some of the contaminated media at a site can be excavated and sequestered in on-site disposal cells; and some of the contaminants will remain in the subsurface, including ground water, under conditions that make their removal time-consuming or prohibitively costly. Wastes to be sent to disposal facilities are found in storage tanks, containers, and old disposal areas, some of which were little more than trenches that provided meager
5
DOE provided many documents for this study. Near the end of the project, DOE provided some key documents on current planning and guidance from headquarters (DOE 2002a, 2002b; INEEL 2002) to the committee less than one week before the final committee meeting, with hardcopies of one document arriving during the meeting. As a result, the committee has had limited opportunities for discussion and follow up on the documents.
6
Choices that allocated costs and risks did not involve deliberate decisions to distribute known costs and risks to identified groups or generations. Rather, choices like discharging liquid wastes into the soil at Hanford de facto allocated unknown risks to some future generations.
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FIGURE 1. Map of sites anticipated to requrie long-term stewardship by DOE (DOE 2001b).
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isolation and created additional contamination that requires cleanup. The disposal facilities and contaminated media that remain in place will require LTS.
At some sites the residual hazards will decline relatively quickly because of rapid radioactive decay or biodegradation, for example, sites contaminated with tritium, which has a half-life of 12.3 years. At many sites the hazards will persist for centuries (e.g., Cs-137 and Sr-90 have half-lives of about 30 years), millennia (e.g., Pu-239 has a 24,000-year half-life), or essentially forever (e.g., uranium and stable heavy metals).
Quantified examples of the consequences if institutional controls7 or other planned LTS measures fail are few. This is because there are few risk assessments that examine loss-of-control scenarios. But it is useful to consider the case of uranium ore processing sites. If institutional controls for cleanup and disposal of wastes fail at such sites, lifetime cancer risks to persons exposed to these wastes could easily be in excess of 10-2, and in some cases could far exceed this risk level.8 The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) requires in its regulations assurance that passive physical (engineered) controls be effective for at least 200 years and recognizes the need for institutional controls as a backup to physical control measures,9 yet the hazard will endure far longer than that.10 Simply meeting the standard and initially complying with the regulation could result in risks that would likely be unacceptable at sites operating under different regulations. For example, the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) allows for consideration of cost-risk tradeoffs for risks below 10-4, but requires action above that risk level. As a consequence of the duration of the hazards and of the potentially significant consequences of failure, the challenge of long-term management of these and other DOE legacy waste sites is both
7
DOE’s guidance on institutional controls in RCRA and CERCLA response actions defines institutional controls as “any mechanism(s) used to restrict inappropriate uses of land, facilities, and environmental media by limiting exposure to residual contaminants left behind as part of a CERCLA or RCRA remedy…. Institutional controls can include physical barriers (fences) and legal and communication devices (deed restrictions, zoning, and signs)” (DOE 2000, p. 1).
8
In establishing the standards that govern cleanup and disposal of wastes at these sites, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the risk to a person living in a home over soil uniformly contaminated throughout the subsurface to 5pCi/g radium-226 corresponds to a lifetime increased risk of fatal cancer of approximately 10-2 (U.S. EPA 1983). Concentrations of radium-226 in wastes far in excess of this value will exist at these sites for many thousands of years.
9
The Uranium Mill Tailings Radiation Control Act of 1978 (UMTRCA) requires that these sites be permanently retained in federal control under U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission licenses. U.S. EPA noted in establishing its standards for these sites that institutional control is an essential backup to passive controls for such long-term hazards (48 FR 597).
10
The regulation directly addresses only radium-226 in its soil concentration limits. Radium-226 has a half-life of 1,600 years, but the concentration of this isotope can be sustained or increased by the presence of radioactive precursors, such as thorium-230 (half-life 75,400 years), uranium-234 (half-life 254,000 years), and uranium-238 (half-life 4.5 billion years) also found in these wastes. Thus the hazard can diminish at different rates, depending on the concentrations of these precursors, but in all cases the duration of the hazard is long compared to most institutional timescales.
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novel and difficult: to assure the protection of human health and environment far beyond the conventional time frame of public policy or institutional endurance.11
DOE recognized, earlier than did many other government agencies facing similar problems, that it needed help in understanding LTS and in formulating strategies for addressing its unusual requirements. Several researchers and organizations have provided analyses, among them Probst et al. (1998, 2000), the National Research Council (NRC 2000a), Russell (1998, 2000, 2002), the Environmental Law Institute (ELI 1998), and Pendergrass (1999). Citizen and stakeholder groups have provided ideas and perspectives of their own (RFSWG 2001; EUWG 1998a, 1998b; STGWG 1999; Stewardship Working Group 1999). In the last several years, DOE’s Office of Long-Term Stewardship has begun to flesh out the LTS challenge and to develop policy guidance (DOE 2001a, 2001b, 2002a, 2002b; INEEL 2002).
DOE also is pressing to accelerate cleanup and reduce cleanup costs at its sites. One way to end cleanups sooner and to reduce near-term costs is to rely more on LTS. Some people, however, are wary of DOE’s promises regarding LTS, and this wariness undermines and constrains DOE’s ability to speed remediation.12
SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND OBSERVATIONS FROM THE VISITS TO MOUND AND FERNALD
To inform its deliberations, the committee visited two DOE sites in Ohio, Mound and Fernald, as well as the Moab Site in Utah. The committee’s observations from the Ohio sites are discussed in some detail in Appendix E, and the committee’s work on the Moab Site was published previously (NRC 2002a).
In Ohio, the committee found that if the remedial actions now underway at Mound and Fernald succeed (including, ultimately, the relocation of the silo wastes from Fernald), both sites seem to present low environmental risks even if their projected LTS activities were to fail. This cannot be stated without reservation, however, because assessments of failure scenarios have not been carried out at either location. At both sites a measure of trust has developed among the local public, site contractors, regulators, and DOE’s Ohio Office. All parties mentioned good working relationships, within which conflicts can be aired and addressed. Engineering analyses at Fernald seemed to be of high caliber and work on habitat development at the site is remarkable if only for the fact that ecology is being addressed at all. The process of releasing
11
The committee uses the term “institution” in a sociological sense, to include social arrangements like marriage or property. The committee’s usage is compatible with the usage in “institutional controls”, which includes physical controls like fences, as well as rules (implying enforcement mechanisms, courts, etc.).
12
Concern about DOE’s commitment to LTS was expressed by public participants at all of the committee’s site visits and is stated in a letter from the Association of State and Territorial Solid Waste Management Officials (ASTSWMO 2002). At the committee’s meetings, the declared basis for concern was twofold: mistrust of DOE in general because of past secrecy and disregard for public health and safety (voiced at Fernald and Moab); and a worry that those in charge of cleanup have incentives to choose less costly strategies now, even if it results in increased risks in the future (all sites).
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buildings for reuse one by one at Mound—rather than the standard approach of dividing the site into a small number of operable units, so as to develop a more comprehensive, integrated understanding of the site—seemed to encourage cleanup managers to make do with the information and tools already available.
Chief Finding: The committee observed a compartmentalization of cleanup planning and LTS planning at the sites visited: cleanup planning and execution will conclude at a site, and LTS is left to address the resultant end state.
The Ohio sites are only now beginning to address LTS issues, as they near the end of cleanup. The committee concurs with DOE’s own finding that “In many cases, long-term stewardship issues were identified, and remedies were proposed, but detailed plans and procedures to effectively carry out the remedies were not developed” (DOE 2001c).
CHIEF RECOMMENDATION
The committee has observed that DOE treats cleanup and LTS as activities to be planned and executed separately. LTS must cope with what is left behind when cleanup ends, but cleanup is shaped by regulations and takes little account of the obligations of stewardship or the likely limitations of LTS.
Recommendation: DOE should explicitly plan for its stewardship responsibilities, taking into account stewardship capabilities, when making cleanup decisions. DOE should also implement steps to anticipate and carry out those responsibilities throughout the cleanup process.13
Remediation encompasses contaminant reduction, contaminant isolation, and continuing care (NRC 2000a).14 In DOE decision-making the first two constitute cleanup, while the last is LTS. In fact, however, all choices about each of these tasks affect the others: Decisions about how much to spend on contaminant reduction or on engineered barriers to isolate remaining hazards need to take into account the capabilities of LTS to prevent harm from residual contamination. This basic consideration is still lacking in the actual implementation of DOE’s remediation program.
Cleanup and LTS are complementary elements of a single task: protecting human health and the environment now and for the long term. Cleanup decisions cannot be decoupled from LTS considerations. As linked elements of a site remedy, they form a
13
Several other advisory bodies have made similar recommendations (NRC 2000a; Probst and Lowe 2000; Pendergrass and Kirshenberg 2001;INEEL 2002; ECA 2003), and DOE has noted this in some documents (EMAB 1999; DOE 2001a). The predecessor to this committee called the consideration of LTS in concert with other tools for remedial action long-term institutional management (see footnote 4).
14
Note that isolation of contaminants is a way of delaying exposures and, for wastes whose hazard diminishes with time, reducing risk both now and in the future. Continuing care of a site and its remaining contaminant burden, as explained in this report, is a part of the remedy in that it may be needed to support continuing effectiveness in protecting human health and the environment.
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continuum of overlapping choices to be made about long-term management of legacy sites. Choices made before and during cleanup apportion risk and cost across time, as discussed above. Several groups, including this committee’s predecessor and a recent R&D Roadmap team, have provided details on why LTS needs to be considered when establishing cleanup goals and approaches (NRC 2000a; INEEL 2002). They have also provided conceptual models useful for strategic planning, descriptions of limitations in the effectiveness of various LTS measures, and ideas useful in developing implementation plans for LTS.
The committee has found no evidence that DOE (a) is considering requirements for and the likely effectiveness of LTS measures when establishing cleanup goals and approaches, or (b) has worked out practical and enduring means of implementing LTS so as to realize its goals for protection over the long term. In the recent emphasis on accelerated cleanup by DOE, the committee has seen no statement of how DOE will balance that objective against future risks. There is the risk of a need for additional cleanup in the future if remediation is poorly planned or carried out. Moreover, if greater reliance on LTS is chosen over contaminant removal, the consequences and in turn the risks of LTS failures may increase. Explicit consideration of LTS issues when establishing cleanup goals and approaches would demonstrate that DOE is taking its responsibilities seriously—a key step in building trust among wary stakeholders and the wider public, including Congress and state and local governments. The failure to link LTS to cleanup undermines credibility and strengthens the fear among skeptical stakeholders and regulators that a hollow promise of stewardship is being put forward as a substitute for more costly near-term cleanup.
The committee has seen some progress in DOE efforts on LTS. Progress can be seen, for example, in written statements at two sites: Hanford, a large site in Washington state where cleanup is expected to take decades; and Weldon Spring in Missouri, the first medium-sized unit of the DOE complex where long-term stewardship has begun. Both sites have produced LTS planning documents (Hanford 2002; DOE 2002c). These written statements suggest a recognition of LTS, although the documents leave significant questions unanswered.15
A working draft for the Hanford remediation program (Hanford 2002) identifies six LTS program functions,16 with reasonable suggestions for implementation of each. The draft acknowledges that managing remaining contaminants at the site will compete with other priorities (p. 3-1), but there is no articulation of how cleanup and LTS decision making will interact. Managers at Hanford states that they will “work to integrate long-term stewardship concepts into the cleanup decision-making process to ensure consistency and provide opportunities to gain efficiencies” (p. 2-3), but there is no implementation action identified for this objective. Instead, cleanup choices continue to be made without consideration of LTS, and the “starting condition” for LTS (Hanford 2002, Fig. 1-5, p. 1-7) is the residual hazard—even though many choices remain to be made about what that residual hazard should be. The committee also reviewed the “Performance Management Plan for the Accelerated Cleanup of the Hanford Site” (DOE
15
The committee has not undertaken a detailed review of either Weldon Spring or Hanford. Both sites were being considered for site visits when DOE requested early wrap-up of this study.
16
(1) Managing post-cleanup completion residual risks, (2) managing site resources, (3) managing stewardship information, (4) using science and technology, (5) providing post-cleanup completion infrastructure, and (6) integrating long-term stewardship responsibilities (Hanford 2002).
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2002d), a document that spells out substantial changes in the schedule and budget for the Hanford remediation program. LTS is mentioned with little discussion, for example in the statement that “With plans for long-term stewardship integrated into the cleanup, we can take the proper actions at the appropriate time to allow a smooth transition into necessary stewardship activities after the EM cleanup mission is complete” (p ii-iii). There is no mention of the working draft of the site’s own LTS draft report (Hanford 2002). LTS is a critical aspect of remediation at sites like Hanford, where complete cleanup is likely to be impossible. Performance management plans are incomplete when they do not articulate how LTS fits into the decision-making process and when they ignore the criteria or factors that should influence those decisions.
The largest site so far where cleanup has been declared complete, Weldon Spring, was opened to limited public access in the summer of 2002. Management of the site was transferred to DOE’s Grand Junction Office, where its Long-Term Surveillance and Maintenance Program17 resides, even though one of the final regulatory records of decision—the definitive statement that cleanup remedies are in place—remains unsigned.18 Thus, activities that are logically part of cleanup have been shifted into LTS, or placed in a limbo between cleanup and LTS.
This approach may prove innocuous at Weldon Spring, where the ground-water remedy is intended to be natural attenuation combined with active remediation in situ. If the end of cleanup is treated so casually at other sites, however, one might fear that a site like Fernald would enter LTS with neither a place nor a method to send its silo wastes (see Appendix E) for disposal. One might envision similar difficulties with the single-shell tank wastes at Hanford, which have a long and troubled history. In effect, the stewards could be saddled with either cleanup or maintenance problems that are much more hazardous and technically challenging than the program is being equipped to handle. Without proper integration of decisions on clean-up and LTS, there is no mechanism to stop the transfer of inappropriate responsibilities and risks to an LTS program that does not have the resources or capabilities to manage the continuing liabilities. Indeed, clean-up authorities face incentives to do just that.19
Despite statements embracing LTS in recent DOE documents (DOE 2002a, 2002b), the way in which DOE has selected, developed, and implemented remedies means that LTS continues to be an afterthought in practice. Recognizing the interdependent nature of cleanup and LTS would enable DOE, and the many other government agencies facing similar problems, to make better decisions and construct more credible plans for the long term. Adopting this way of thinking about environmental management at legacy waste sites would entail incorporating LTS into every stage of environmental management. This means looking at issues that will be important during the long term in all phases and activities related to the remedy: site investigation, option
17
The Long-Term Surveillance and Maintenance Program is the operating arm of DOE in carrying out LTS at closed sites, directing and overseeing contractors that physically care for all of the uranium mill tailings sites and a number of other sites for which DOE is responsible.
18
See DOE (2002c) for an acknowledgment that the record of decision governing continuing ground-water treatment has not been agreed to by regulators.
19
The committee discussed the question of whether cleanup and LTS functions should be housed in the same entity to reduce incentives for shifting costs and liabilities, but the committee had not gathered data that would provide a foundation for a conclusion either way.
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development and remedy selection, monitoring, and future adaptation to changing circumstances.20 Each of these is discussed below in the section titled Incorporating LTS into environmental management, following a discussion of how defining DOE’s mission of LTS solely in terms of regulatory compliance is insufficient.
WHAT IS STEWARDSHIP?
DOE uses the term “long-term stewardship” to describe the activities required at contaminated sites where cleanup is “complete” (see Footnote 1), that is, after site closure. As part of LTS, DOE explicitly takes responsibility for complying with all applicable regulations for the environmental management of the site into the indefinite future (see, e.g., DOE 2001b).
The word “stewardship” is resonant in our language and has been readily accepted by many people who have different understandings of the word (see La Porte 2000). In this committee’s view, stewardship comprises several tasks: A steward of very long-lived hazards acts as
a guardian, stopping activities that could be dangerous;
a watchman for problems as they arise, via monitoring that is effective in design and practice, activating responses and notifying responsible parties as needed;21
a land manager, facilitating ecological processes and human use;
a repairer of engineered and ecological structures as failures occur and are discovered, as unexpected problems are found, and as re-remediation is needed;
an archivist of knowledge and data, to inform the future;
an educator to affected communities, renewing memory of the site’s history, hazards, and burdens; and
a trustee, assuring the financial wherewithal to accomplish all of the other functions.22
20
The committee’s charge directs the committee to look at legacy waste sites. The approach, of course, also applies to decisions at sites that could become legacy waste sites. That is, DOE would benefit from considering the long-term implications of current and future actions that might lead to contamination or waste generation.
21
A watchman might alert responsible parties of needs or opportunities for re-remediation or application of new technologies to reduce contaminant inventories. The question of what actions to take is a separate decision, as with the cleanup and LTS decisions that are being made today.
22
An additional factor to consider is how to address future cases where people are injured by residual hazards at one of the sites. Whether the steward is the appropriate party to
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This range of activities requires the human and institutional capacity to fulfill these roles as needed, through the decades and centuries in which the risks persist. The human and institutional demands of these activities are broader than the traditional engineering expertise of DOE, raising questions of how best to meet the federal government’s responsibilities over the long term.
Moreover, a steward does not act in a vacuum. Technological capabilities are likely to change. Study of monitoring data and the accumulating experience of stewards is likely to improve both understanding of the sites and of how to manage them effectively. Both sets of changes will likely prompt reappraisal of risks and consideration of additional remediation. The likelihood of such development implies a responsibility for stewardship at the national level, in addition to the site-centered roles listed above. The committee calls for a national dialogue at the end of this report, in part to articulate these programmatic responsibilities so that they may be taken up in a sensible fashion.
Beyond a Compliance Culture
LTS begins with a recognition of the dimensions of the long-term obligations of the legacy wastes. DOE’s actions observed by the committee do not yet reflect such an understanding. Instead, the committee has seen a more narrow focus on meeting compliance agreements and regulations, as if DOE’s responsibilities were grounded only in these: Regulators agree to a remedy, creating a compliance agreement, and the requirement of LTS is that DOE sustain the remedy. Compliance is necessary, of course, but the problem with a strict reliance on compliance is that today’s regulations do not fully address LTS challenges.23
Under its agreements with state and federal regulators, DOE undertakes to manage the residual contamination at the legacy waste sites; compliance with those agreements is a means to that end. Yet the regulations on which the agreements rest do not engage all of the difficult issues presented by the legacy wastes. This is so even though the long-term effectiveness and permanence of a remedy is one of the criteria to be used in remedy selection under CERCLA,24 the law that frames decision making for
compensate people who are found to have legitimate claims of injury is a complex issue that the committee has not explored.
23
DOE’s 2001 report to Congress on LTS (DOE 2001b) makes this point, too: “Some long-term stewardship activities have been mandated by regulation, compliance agreements, DOE Orders, or site-specific documents, while others are yet to be defined. Although statutory and regulatory requirements provide guidelines for long-term stewardship, existing requirements do not clearly delineate the measures needed in the future for long-term stewardship; nor do they ensure the development of effective implementation strategies” (p. 2-11).
24
CERCLA states that cleanup remedies “...shall take into account the total short- and long-term costs of such actions, including the costs of operation and maintenance for the entire period during which such activities will be required” (CERCLA par. 121(a)), and that the selected remedy “...utilizes permanent remedies...to the maximum extent practicable.” (CERCLA par. 121(b)(1)). According to the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan (40 CFR Part 300), which is the set of regulations that implements CERCLA, remedies are to be selected from among remedial alternatives using nine evaluation criteria: (1) overall protection of human health and the environment; (2) compliance with the chemical-specific standards that are considered the statutorily required “applicable or relevant and appropriate requirements”
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At both Mound and Fernald, where cleanup is well advanced, site characterization efforts had overlooked potentially significant interactions between the site and its surroundings. For example, at Mound, proper understanding of how an underlying bedrock system might hydraulically connect the site with surrounding areas appeared to be lacking. At Fernald, interactions between the site and an adjacent contaminated site where pump-and-treat remediation was being proposed had not been considered. Understanding potential interactions between a site and its surroundings is key to predicting long-term contaminant behavior at a site and designing sensible monitoring programs. Yet, in these two locations such interactions had not been taken into account.
Protecting public health is the chief objective of cleanup and LTS. In addition to its intrinsic value, the health of people in communities surrounding DOE legacy waste sites and of people working on or near those sites is a potential indicator of contaminant or radiation exposures. Their health could be monitored. The committee has not examined public health activities and research at DOE sites, but was considering how plans to monitor the health of local communities, and specifically people who interact with the site, could be incorporated as part of the surveillance needed for LTS.
Question: How can DOE incorporate the evolving understanding of the requirements, likely capabilities, and limitations of LTS into choices about targets and end states of cleanup at DOE sites?
Explicitly considering LTS issues when making cleanup decisions entails asking what is at risk, and how important is it? What are our capabilities for LTS with respect to what is at risk? How do these fit with our capabilities for cleanup? How might all these change over time? These all lead to the summary question whose answer depends on the above, what is the appropriate mix of cleanup and LTS? Asking and addressing these questions closes the loop on remedy development and selection, recognizing that LTS is an essential part of the remedy and not an afterthought. In addition, by openly discussing LTS, DOE can build trust as it carries out cleanup, strengthening the understanding and support for LTS when stewardship begins.
The institutional components of LTS are discussed at the end of this report, but here it is important to point out that the institutional aspects of remediation need to be analyzed with other elements of a remedy, taking into account the capabilities and limitations of institutional controls (Applegate and Dycus 1998; ELI 1995; Pendergrass 1996,1999, 2000). Unfortunately, while DOE has devoted substantial resources to research into such matters as how to assure that concrete barriers surrounding wastes will endure, DOE has devoted little effort to the design of and provision for institutional controls, on which long-term protection of health and environment will depend. Suggestions for remedying this failure are discussed below.
Planning For Fallibility
Unforeseen events will occur at DOE’s legacy waste sites. These events might include failure of a remedy to prevent degradation of a waste cell, a concern at the Moab Site (NRC 2002a); the failure of remedies to meet prescribed cleanup or containment
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goals; discovery of “unexpected” contamination (NRC 1997, 2000b);32 or unintended use of the land by humans, animals, or plants. LTS at each site is unavoidably a complex system made up of interactions among engineered environments, natural environments, and human institutions, which makes them somewhat unpredictable.33 At each site the committee visited, the committee saw little consideration of the question “what are the consequences if controls fail?” “Plan for fallibility” was a principal recommendation of this committee’s predecessor (NRC 2000a).
Question: What are the consequences of LTS failures at DOE’s sites?
DOE appears to have considered only the intended future land uses at Mound and Fernald in its assessments of risks in the future. Yet institutional controls have sometimes failed, endangering public health and environmental quality.34 When asked to describe the risks if unintended uses (specifically, residential uses) were to emerge at these sites despite prohibitions, however, DOE was unable to provide an answer at any of the sites the committee visited, because only the intended uses had been examined.
The probability and harms associated with failures must be factored into decisions about the scope, extent, redundancy, and diversity of controls and other LTS provisions. All risks are not created equal. A failure of one type could result in an increase in human health risk that, while undesirable, is not catastrophic. Construction of residences on parts of Fernald designated to be held as open space might be an example of this category of risk, while excavation and use of the mill tailings at Moab for building material could lead to more significant exposures. These factors must be considered when determining the level of assurance sought in decision making. Some have provocatively asked, “Does anyone actually think that people are going to die at these sites?” The answer must be that we do not know if people will die as a result of contaminants at these sites, because the analyses have not been done.
There is another kind of uncertainty: programmatic risk. Suppose the selected remedial actions are implemented as planned, but fail to achieve their goals? The committee observed scant recognition or consideration of this possibility, which is salient with respect to the cleanup of ground water. Several analyses (NRC 1994, 1997, 2000b) have concluded that pump-and-treat remedies for ground-water contamination may be much less successful than hoped. Pump and treat can provide adequate containment of the dissolved contaminant plume if the pumping strategy is designed and operated to provide hydraulic capture of the plume. Yet containment may fail to achieve site cleanup in any reasonable time frame when sufficient contaminant mass is not removed. As a result, contaminant rebound has been noted at numerous CERCLA sites once pumping is terminated (NRC 1994); in these situations, pump-and-treat systems may have to be
32
DOE discovered additional contamination at Moab when it took over the site, and has found unexpected amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the ground water at Mound.
33
See Perrow (1984) concerning accidents and predictability in complex systems.
34
Failure of institutional controls at Love Canal near Buffalo, New York, led in part to enactment of CERCLA in 1980 (Epstein et al. 1982; Landy et al. 1994). U.S. EPA Region 5 guidance in the RCRA Corrective Action Program explicitly asks the question “What is the potential for future residential, recreational, or agricultural uses for all or part of the facility? What are the potential risks to these other receptors?” (U.S. EPA 2000). In other words, at an industrial-use site, what is the potential for residential or agricultural use and what are the risks to those users?
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maintained indefinitely. Failure of pump-and-treat to achieve cleanup is especially likely if the site has a mixture of radioactive contaminants and organic chemicals (e.g., chlorinated solvents or fuels). Alternatives to pump-and-treat can be considered at some sites, but at others, recognition has to be given to the fact that hazards may endure in ground water for periods far longer than originally intended.
Guidance for doing risk assessments for contaminated sites is reasonably mature, but estimates of risks far into the future inevitably become progressively less certain. Methods for assessing risks from the failure of waste containment cells are not consistent or well developed. U.S. EPA, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (U.S. NRC), and different sites within DOE have different approaches for assessing risks of failure of engineered barriers, and it would be worthwhile to develop a method to characterize the various approaches and to seek consensus on best practices.
Recommendation: Plan for fallibility. Conduct failure analyses to inform decisions. Seek consensus on best practices in risk analysis for failure of disposal cells.
Planning for fallibility is a central component of earning trust. Acknowledging fallibility builds credibility. Planning for fallibility entails considering in decision making the consequences of failures of institutional and engineered controls, and designing robust mechanisms to respond to such failures.
Monitoring
Monitoring is an essential part of LTS. It provides the mechanisms for detecting anticipated possible failures, detecting unanticipated events, and evaluating the effectiveness of remedial actions. Monitoring is also essential to learning as LTS proceeds. Monitoring cannot be de-coupled from an understanding of the design decisions that were made at sites: for example, failure detection requires a quantitative understanding of the acceptable bounds of system behavior. Thus, an important challenge of a durable monitoring program will be transfer of knowledge, and not simply data, to successive generations of stewards in a way that supports the mission.
Monitoring must be tailored to the characteristics of a site and its residual contaminants; the variables to monitor, as well as protocols for measurement, need to reflect the site and the risks it poses, for both practical and economic reasons. There is enormous variation across the legacy sites within the DOE complex, but that does not mean that each site should have its own scheme for reporting and retrieving monitoring data—just the reverse is true. A shared framework for reporting monitoring data is essential to assure that the information is preserved and useful. Comparisons among sites, so as to detect failures and problems, will be difficult or impossible without monitoring data that can be compared. It is also important to preserve accessibility of electronic records, since many forms of technical information, such as simulation models and geographic information systems, can only be read in electronic form. The tools for reading such data, together with the formats used to encode them, have been changing rapidly over the past two decades, and it is unclear that durable standards will evolve soon. The distinction between monitoring, which reflects the characteristics of the site, and reporting, which reflects the enduring national responsibility for LTS, must be reflected in policies, budgets, and practices. The committee saw evidence at each of the
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sites studied that these issues were recognized, but national guidance is lacking, so that the process of implementation is undermining consistent, retrievable reporting of monitoring.
Recommendation: DOE should tailor its monitoring to the specific risks and circumstances of its sites, while at the same time providing national-level guidance for reporting formats and record-preservation protocols.
Institutional Challenges—Trust, Constancy, Learning
Long-term management of the legacy wastes remaining after cleanup will be shaped by two precarious societal conditions: trust in implementing institutions, and confidence that those institutions will exercise stewardship satisfactorily over many generations. In addition, the technological and organizational means to implement LTS are still being developed as sites reach closure. DOE accordingly needs to learn from this experience. These are significant challenges, but there is some relevant experience in the operation of high-reliability organizations as well as in the management of natural resources. High-reliability organizational tasks, such as air-traffic control, require high levels of trust, both within the operating organization and in its social environment. A central finding of studies of high-reliability organizations is that public confidence reflects the way in which the operations of an organization are carried out. In the present context, this means that how planning and cleanup are carried out shapes the confidence the public, stakeholders, and political leadership will place in DOE as cleanup ends. Not only is the substance of LTS affected by choices made in the cleanup process, but so is the social setting in which LTS will be conducted. That setting is critically important to the ability of the steward to discharge its responsibilities. Thus, a question posed at the beginning of the section on incorporating LTS into environmental management is restated here.
Question: How can DOE carry out its mission of environmental management in such a way that when people learn more about DOE’s activities, they are likely to gain confidence in the institution and its actions?
Trust and constancy
The confidence level of stakeholders and the public—their trust in DOE—bears a direct relationship to the latitude, resources, and esteem afforded to, or withheld from, the agency. If there is a surplus of trust in implementing organizations, leaders are likely to have a good deal of discretion, adequate resources, and considerable esteem, resulting in technological autonomy. If, however, the implementing institutions face a deficit of public trust and confidence, conflict is likely to rise (even over technical issues), regulatory constraints can multiply, and resources can become more difficult to obtain.
The greater the deficit the more institutional leaders are pressed to recover it. Where there is a great deficit, some argue that recapturing trust may be impossible (Slovic 1993). Sidebar 1 summarizes means of maintaining and rebuilding trust. The essentially permanent responsibility of LTS and the inherent uncertainties involved make it especially challenging to cultivate trust in institutions implementing LTS. The longer a project, and the more generations of managerial leadership required, the greater the
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SIDEBAR 1 MEANS OF MAINTAINING AND ENHANCING TRUST
Interaction with External Parties
Early, continuous involvement of stakeholders’ advisory groups with frequent contact, complete candor, rapid, and full response.
Timely accomplishment of agreements unless modified through an open process agreed to in advance.
Consistent, respectful reaching out to state and community leaders and the general public to inform, consult about technical, operational, societal, and equity aspects of agency activities.
Active, periodic presence of leaders at the highest echelons, visible and accessible to citizens at sites and in neighboring communities.
Consistency in approach, willingness to acknowledge mistakes.
Visible agency and contractor presence in neighbor communities, with staff contributing to community affairs and paying their fair share of taxes and other common burdens.
Assurance of negotiated benefits to the community, including resources to the affected host communities that are needed to detect and respond to unexpected costs. (This objective conflicts with the need to downsize work forces as a site is closed.)
Internal Organizational Conditions
High professional and managerial competence and discipline in meeting technically realistic schedules with high transparency in the meeting of schedules and goals.
Fostering of an organization culture emphasizing safety for workers and the public by executives at the highest echelons of participating organizations.
Technical options whose implications are connected to public concerns and clearly demonstrable to broad segments of the public.
Processes of self-assessment that permit the agency to “get ahead of problems” and openly acknowledge them before they are discovered by outsiders.
Tough internal processes of reviewing and discovering actual operating errors that include stakeholders.
Clear, institutionalized assignment of responsibility for regaining and sustaining public trust and confidence and for ensuring constancy.
Sources: La Porte and Metlay (1996), DOE (1993), La Porte (2001).
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SIDEBAR 2 CHARACTERISTICS ASSOCIATED WITH INSTITUTIONAL CONSTANCY
Assurance of Steadfast Political Will
A culture of commitment, including periodic reaffirmation of unswerving adherence to the spirit of the initial agreement.
Strong articulation of commitments by leaders at the upper echelons of all participating organizations, calling on staff to sustain constancy.
Clear evidence of organizational continuity with institutional norms that nurture the persistence of commitments across many generations.
Vigorous external reinforcement from regulatory agencies, stakeholders, and attentive public.
Organizational Infrastructure of Constancy
Administrative and technical capacity to carry out constancy-reinforcing activities backed by agency incentives.
Adequate resources to assure the transfer of requisite technical, cultural, and institutional knowledge from one worker and management generation to another.
Analytical and resource support for careful examination of technical changes on future impacts.
Capacity to detect and remedy inevitable failures and their effects, with the assurance of remediation when failures occur.
Sources: La Porte and Keller (1996), La Porte (2000, 2001).
likelihood of a loss of institutional memory and diffusion of commitment—and the greater the need for institutional constancy. No formal human institution has endured as long as the projected life of some of these hazards. Institutional constancy entails organizational perseverance and faithful adherence to the mission and its imperatives over long time periods. The goal of constancy is to give confidence that organizations will keep their word from one management generation to another. Characteristics of institutional constancy are listed in Sidebar 2 (La Porte and Keller, 1996). A deficit of trust and limited assurance of institutional constancy make implementing LTS arduous under the best of circumstances, given industrial societies' practice of discarding most materials as wastes. It is therefore important for institutions and their leaders to tackle the deficit of trust openly.
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Learning
Even under an accelerated schedule, active remediation of DOE’s legacy waste sites will last for decades and involve activities at more than 100 locations in different geographic settings. As cleanup concludes at each site, the resources flowing in from DOE are expected to decline substantially, not only in funding but also in the technical expertise on-site, and in the information produced by a declining profile of activity. The diversity of sites and length of time that cleanup will take both provide useful opportunities for learning from experience, strengthening the knowledge base for LTS.35
Reduced resource flows also mean that stewardship will unfold in a far different social and political environment than today’s cleanup program. What is unclear, in light of the problem of trust and constancy, is whether a different social setting will make LTS harder or easier than is currently anticipated.
Ground-water cleanup is expected to continue at most sites for a long period after they enter LTS, because of the slow pace at which subsurface contamination can be treated. The decades-long duration of ground-water operations means that DOE will be tending the site, and monitoring containment long enough that DOE will enact rolling stewardship before the remedial actions are complete. This provides a time period in which to build trust and to test institutional constancy, while gaining experience with containment measures.
A study panel of the National Research Council (NRC 2003b) recently recommended to the U.S. Navy an approach to conducting its ground-water cleanup so as to improve its understanding of the hydrogeological behavior of contaminated sites. The primary innovation is to use a conceptual site model to bring together the technical and institutional understanding of the site and the environment of its surrounding land and water. The conceptual site model creates a framework for selecting monitoring locations and protocols, together with expected values of contaminants and other environmental indicators over time. The conceptual site model is expected to be incorrect, because predictions of site behavior are based upon incomplete understanding. But as cleanup proceeds and land use and other conditions change, the conceptual site model can be updated and corrected by the monitoring process. In essence, this is a way of incorporating learning into management by making development of understanding and adaptation to change an explicit core component of the mission. In this approach, known as adaptive management (Holling 1978; Walters 1986; Lee 1993), surprise is expected and surveillance yields improved understanding. Adaptive staging, a related idea advanced by another National Research Council committee (NRC 2003a), could serve as a model for thinking about these issues with respect to management of long-term hazards, especially for cleanups that will take a long time.
As the committee argues above, regulations do not provide adequate guidance on the risks to be managed in the long term. An adaptive approach, using a conceptual
35
Recent National Academies studies on risk and adaptive staging have emphasized the value of a recursive, iterative process that allows for the use of knowledge obtained in the future (NRC 2002b, NRC 2003a). This is particularly important over the long time periods at issue with LTS; it is improbable the knowledge available to stewards in 100 or 1000 years—if only from experience—will be the same as that of the present day.
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site model, provides an explicit set of understandings and predictions, which can, in turn, frame a discussion among DOE, regulators, and stakeholders on how to go beyond the existing regulations in protecting the site and affected populations and habitats.
Recommendation: During ground water remediation, rolling stewardship should become explicitly adaptive, adopting learning as an explicit objective. This can serve as a pilot effort for incorporating learning into all elements of LTS. Use of an adaptive management framework, such as a conceptual site model, should be explored as a means of organizing learning at the DOE legacy sites.
At the national level, this means that the experiences of sites in different political jurisdictions should be studied, with the aim of assuring that the variations in performance are due to differences in local environmental conditions, rather than differences in the capacities of local managers and institutions. A process with some parallels (not all reassuring) is the periodic re-accreditation of colleges and universities to provide assurance of national quality control while permitting substantial autonomy and variation.
It is important to note that adaptive management of natural resources has not been successfully implemented (Lee 1999). Although it is technically straightforward, adaptive management has encountered institutional difficulties, rooted in the reality that managers are reluctant to be proven wrong—even when correcting understanding that is known to be incomplete is a stated mission. If DOE wishes to build trust and a reputation for constancy, however, it is timely for the Department to admit something that is obvious to all observers of radioactive waste management: The task is difficult and understanding is incomplete. Paradoxically, building trust is a strong reason to admit the possibility of errors and to seek open ways of recognizing error and improving understanding going forward.
Recommendation: DOE should build understanding during the remaining period of cleanup, so as to make LTS a welcome step as sites are closed. Activities during the ground-water cleanup phase provide important opportunities to build credibility.
In its work the committee has come to appreciate the substantial gaps in the nation’s organizational, operational, and social understanding of how to manage the hazardous residues of industrial economies over very long periods of time. Addressing these gaps will be critical to long-term institutional management, and social science research should be carried out as an integral component of research and development in waste management.
Other reports (INEEL 2002; NRC 2000a) have called for case studies and comparisons among sites to bring together the lessons of past experience (NRC 2002a). In the decades to come, as cleanup proceeds, it is also worthwhile investing in social science studies that can improve trust, constancy, and learning. In particular, the characteristics of high-reliability organizations are related to trust and constancy (La Porte 2001), and the continuing efforts to improve the ability of organizations to learn in the face of uncertainty (Walters and Holling 1990; Lee 1999) are priorities to be considered.
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ALLOCATING RISKS & COSTS WITHIN AND ACROSS GENERATIONS: A NATIONAL DIALOGUE
At any given point in time, each DOE site imposes a mix of risks, costs to maintain the risk within acceptable levels, and uncertainty as to future risks and costs (Russell 2002). Consequently, each decision at the site incorporates compromises and tradeoffs among these factors, and should reflect and implement societal values concerning each. Long-term costs, liabilities, and benefits are difficult to take into account: Their estimates are inherently uncertain, and there is no consensus on how to value their consequences and translate those as a guide to current decisions (see e.g., Portney and Weyant 1999 and NAPA 1997).36 Yet DOE’s cleanup program cannot entirely eliminate the risks; the program only alters the mix of risk and costs to be borne at different places and times. As noted near the beginning of this report, all remediation decisions are choices that affect that mix and what burden is borne in cleanup and in long-term stewardship. Thus, DOE has been making decisions that affect the well-being of this and future generations, usually without recognizing that fact or explicitly weighing its implications.
Many of these decisions will have consequences that are costly to reverse— materials may be moved or barriers may be built to immobilize contaminants, property may change hands, and other steps may be taken that would be difficult or impossible to undo. In particular, choices made in the past have created responsibilities that endure, such as the decisions made to precipitate liquid wastes in the Hanford tanks, which created solidified materials that are difficult and expensive to deal with (see, e.g., Gerber 1992). For this reason, a deliberate and transparent decision-making process is needed to spell out the implications of remediation decisions for risks and costs in the future. Those implications go beyond expectations of technical outcomes and include how those outcomes will be valued in an individual and societal context.
Sharing the Burden: The DOE Cleanup Program is not alone in needing LTS
As noted earlier in this report, without a coherent set of guiding principles for making choices among the burdens to be borne by present and future generations in addressing enduring risks, DOE’s decisions will continue to be made ad hoc and will remain difficult to justify. DOE is the nation’s agent in these decisions on allocations of risks and costs within and across generations, and needs guidance on how to make them.
That some sites contaminated by industrial activities cannot be completely cleaned up is still being recognized by landowners and governments responsible for safety, health, and environment. When the predecessor to this committee issued its report in the year 2000, the primary finding regarded as newsworthy by the American press was the sheer number of contaminated sites in the DOE complex that would require LTS. There are many other sites that are also likely to remain contaminated, mostly with chemical toxins, in this and other nations.
36
Discounting with either zero or non-zero rates arouses debates even within groups that accept a benefit-cost accounting framework. Other bases for making tradeoffs are often in conflict with the benefit-cost framework.
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The management of potentially hazardous sites over extended periods of time is a burden shared by many federal agencies. While DOE’s approach to this issue is the focus of this study, the responsibility of DOE for its legacy sites bears strong similarity to EPA’s responsibility for closed Superfund sites or hazardous waste landfills, DOD’s responsibilities for its former and present facilities, the Department of Interior’s responsibilities at thousands of sites including abandoned mines, and states’ responsibilities at “brownfield” sites that are not on the National Priorities List. In the CERCLA program alone, over 600 sites include institutional controls in their RODs (U.S. EPA 2001). The federal government has hundreds of complex, multicontaminant sites, which are difficult to clean up. It therefore makes sense to approach them in a coherent fashion. Similarly, while the goal is preservation of the good rather than protection from the bad, the National Park Service and National Wildlife Refuge System face open-ended responsibilities that also fall within a common notion of stewardship.
These are national issues, they involve deeply held values, and they have substantial consequences for present and future generations. In short, they demand and deserve broad public discussion. Instead, however, they have been treated mostly as technical issues with only parochial attention paid to the values that are involved. The beginning point for resolving these issues and providing DOE and other agencies with the guidance they need would be a public dialogue to inform and engage people in a process that allows their values to be expressed and heard. Reaching resolution may well require national leadership. DOE and the other affected agencies can take responsibility for initiating such a dialogue, perhaps by making the implicit value predicates of their decisions apparent and requesting comment. They are the bodies that are both most knowledgeable and most directly involved in these issues.
Subsequently, of course, the criteria and methods for decision-making for such situations would need to be devised. To the extent that DOE sites are comparable to those of other federal agencies, a coordinated effort across agencies could help develop systematic methods for addressing such decisions. Within DOE, generic problems such as long-term site management have been the subject of programmatic environmental impact statements. A similar interagency process could lead to the implementation of methods that gain general public acceptance. Such a broad national approach could also lead to better interagency coordination to improve stewardship.
An effort is underway to develop a memorandum of understanding on LTS at federal facilities among the Environmental Council of the States, DOE, the U.S. Department of Defense, the U.S. Department of Interior, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The purpose is to provide a basis for discussion and coordination on LTS issues by establishing shared principles for LTS and seeking agreement on how LTS fits into the remedy process, what LTS goals are, what is expected from LTS, who is responsible for fulfilling LTS functions, and what is needed to support them.37 This is a commendable step toward the kind of national dialogue that the committee recommends.
The legacy wastes pose an unfamiliar and difficult challenge to society and to DOE. Sites that cannot be cleaned up enough to permit unrestricted access remain
37
Howard Roitman, acting director of environmental programs, Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, informed the committee via personal communication of the status of a resolution by ECOS (2001) on this topic.
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hostage to technology and organization. Engineered barriers may fail; ground-water cleanup may not succeed; most of all, organizations comprised of human beings need to remember, monitor, and respond when problems are discovered. Humans are fallible, a frailty inherited by organizations. This is the legacy that matters most. Stewardship of religious, educational, and civic institutions has succeeded for centuries, and in a few cases for longer. Stewardship has succeeded when people have sustained their attention and capacity in the face of adversity and distraction. Long-term stewardship of the legacy sites needs to be taken into account at all stages of remediation, not only because LTS is an important social goal, but because it tests society’s diligence to an unusual degree.
DOE managers today stand at the starting point of a journey. Future generations will need to find their own way with the legacy waste sites. What the current generation needs to do is to make its choices about cleanup and LTS in ways that will give future generations the knowledge and resources to make their choices responsibly. DOE is choosing a course on which to embark and a vessel in which to sail.
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