Abstract
After decades of out-of-control behavior, the Energy Department's Nuclear Age balloon mortgage comes due.
In the summer of 1997, I received a phone call from Jim Bailey. At the time I was working as a senior official in the Energy Department's Office of Policy. Bailey was an ex-Marine who worked out of the department's Oak Ridge site. He was one of 238 Energy Department special agents who trucked nuclear weapons around the country.
1994: The “hydrofracture” facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where waste was injected into the ground—a practice that ended in 1983.
Jim's infant daughter Kelly died in 1995 of three rare brain tumors, and he was fearful that his exposure to radiation had caused genetic damage that he had passed on to her. After the death of his daughter, Bailey and his fellow couriers asked their supervisors for more extensive radiation protection. Their managers refused. According to Bailey, one manager told him that even inexpensive measures, such as increased radiation training and more exposure testing, would hurt morale by creating doubts about radiation safety.
Management's logic had the opposite effect. Distrust grew and the couriers started checking their trucks with radiation monitoring devices that were supposed to be used only in case of an accident.
Subsequently, Bailey was tested by a cancer specialist who told him that he had chromosomal damage linked to radiation exposure. At the advice of his doctor, Bailey refused to go back to work despite the department's counseling efforts to persuade him that his fears were unfounded. He was fired in September 1996. A few days later, the department, without explanation, removed radiation monitors from all the vehicles.
Bad idea. In the late summer of 1997, ABC news did a story that asked whether the couriers who hauled nuclear weapons about the country were properly protected from radiation. Energy's Albuquerque Operations Office responded by calling in the FBI, alleging that classified information had been given to the news media.
By this time, Bailey was caught up in a protracted legal battle with the department. Meanwhile, the FBI was investigating alleged security breaches and 18 couriers had been put on suspension after refusing to undergo lie detector tests regarding the alleged leaks. Moreover, people angry with management and anxious about being exposed to radiation were driving nuclear weapons around the country. I had many sleepless nights over that.
Trucking weapons was an operational issue and not in my portfolio of responsibilities. I had been brought into the department as a policy adviser. My tasks ranged from leading Energy Department expert teams in North Korea in safely securing plutonium-bearing reactor fuel to helping set up an agency-wide asset management program. But while Bailey's 1997 call was unusual, it was not entirely unexpected.
I had been an environmental activist for 13 years before serving for five years in the Senate as an investigator overseeing the Energy Department. My reputation as a “guardian angel” for whistle-blowers had stayed with me. That was why then-Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary asked me to join the department in late 1993.
I explained to Bailey that I normally didn't get involved in operational issues, but I promised to see what I could do. I brought it to the attention of the new Energy Secretary, Federico Peña, who replaced O'Leary.
Peña's staff responded positively. Peña had been familiar with at least one concern raised by Bailey well before I brought it up. In November 1996 an Energy Department truck carrying a nuclear device had skidded off an icy road in Nebraska.
Because the radiation monitoring instruments had been removed by the department, the president of the United States and his cabinet—in particular, then-Transportation Secretary Peña—had been clueless about the extent of the public risk for nearly 12 hours. Finally, a specially trained Energy Department emergency response team showed up. Fortunately, it turned out to be a minor event.
Later investigations found several serious problems with the department's nuclear courier system. Couriers were not being provided with adequate information about radiation dangers. And despite having critical responsibilities, they were paid substantially less than drivers who hauled vegetables.
1984: The first plutonium production reactor, located at the Hanford Reservation in Washington State, ceased operating in 1968.
After more than a year, the FBI could not substantiate the charges made against the couriers and an internal Energy Department investigation found that the manager who called in the FBI had acted improperly and he was transferred.
As many of these findings were coming out in the fall of 1998, I was made senior policy adviser to Bill Richardson, the new secretary of energy. Richardson was angry that the couriers were paid so poorly and he fixed the disparity. But the remaining problems festered as Richardson found his hands full with a growing list of other problems and demands on his time.
As of early April, the department's nuclear courier problems remain unresolved. The department's general counsel still refuses to settle with Jim Bailey on the death of his daughter, Kelly, despite the fact that Energy agreed with the recommendation made by a special review panel to do so.
The 18 couriers who were wrongfully suspended are still not back on the job because of bureaucratic indecision over whether they should take mandatory lie detector tests related to alleged leaks.
All couriers have been told not to communicate with anyone involved in independent reviews of their program, and radiation monitors have yet to be placed back on the trucks.
Moreover, the Energy Department official who was transferred after investigations found serious problems was recently promoted. Overseeing the couriers is once again part of his job description.
Costs be damned
The nuclear weapons courier situation was emblematic of the department's inept and often arrogant management culture. Like his predecessors, Richardson faces a daunting problem of trying to gain control over a bureaucracy responsible for the government's largest and most dangerous enterprise.
The Energy Department is a highly scattered and fragmented system with few enforceable rules. Adm. James Watkins, secretary of energy during the Bush administration, likened it to an aircraft carrier where the hydraulic lines between the rudder and the captain's bridge were not connected. They still are not connected. In fact, the department's patchwork system is even less coherent. That is a serious business for an agency with staggering statistics. Energy has:
• Real estate holdings of more than 2.4 million acres—an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined.
• More than 20,700 specialized facilities and buildings, including 5,000 warehouses, 7,000 administrative buildings, 1,600 laboratories, 89 nuclear reactors, 208 particle accelerators, and 665 production and manufacturing facilities.
• More than 130,000 metric tons of chemicals, a quantity roughly equivalent to the annual output of a large chemical manufacturer.
• More than 270,000 metric tons of scrap metal—equivalent to more than two modern aircraft carriers in weight. (The dismantlement of three gaseous diffusion plants will generate about 1.4 million metric tons of additional scrap.)
• More than 17,000 pieces of large industrial equipment.
• More than 40,000 metric tons of base metals and more than 10,000 pounds of precious metals, such as gold, silver, and platinum.
• About 700,000 metric tons of nuclear materials, mostly depleted uranium but also including weapons-grade and fuel-grade plutonium, thorium, and natural and enriched uranium.
• About 320,000 metric tons of stockpiled fuel oil and coal for 67 power plants.
• About 600 million barrels of crude oil stored at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
• Electrical distribution systems for the Bonneville, Western Area, Southwestern, Southeastern, and Alaska power administrations.
If the Energy Department were a private concern with more than 100,000 employees, it would be one of the nation's largest and most powerful corporations. And if it were privately held, it would be filing for bankruptcy.
Major elements of Energy's complex are closing down, leaving a huge unfunded and dangerous mess. After more than a half century of making nuclear weapons, Energy possesses one of the world's largest inventories of dangerous nuclear materials and it has created several of the most contaminated areas in the Western hemisphere.
In the 1940s and 1950s, for instance, some 440 billion gallons of contaminated liquids were discharged into the ground at the Hanford site. That is enough to create a lake 80 feet deep and roughly the size of Manhattan.
Currently, two-thirds of Energy's annual budget ($17.4 billion in fiscal 2000) goes to maintain nuclear weapons and to address the environmental, safety, and health legacies of the Cold War nuclear weapons enterprise. The high priority assigned to nuclear weapons over the decades, combined with secrecy and experimental latitude involving ultra-hazardous technologies, encouraged a cost-be-damned attitude that remains deeply embedded in today's Energy Department.
At the same time, inadequate investments were made to upgrade facilities, infrastructure, waste management, and environmental protection. The failure to invest early in preventive measures has in recent years created a very large environmental liability for the department—estimated by the Office of Environmental Management at $265 billion.
Today, even with most of its weapons production-related plants closed, Energy's nuclear facilities still pose a risk of major accidents and serious exposures to workers and to the public from radioactive and hazardous materials.
Tens of tons of plutonium 239 and highly enriched uranium remain in unsafe or questionable storage containers around the country. Unresolved problems abound—unstable nuclear solutions, residues, metals, and powders in deteriorating containers and tanks; nuclear weapon parts in ill-suited containers; a wide variety of fire and explosion risks; degraded equipment and safety systems; and deteriorating storage facilities—some dating back to World War II. Skilled personnel who can safely fix these problems are disappearing.
Consider the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge. It holds the largest quantity of highly enriched uranium (HEU) of any Energy Department site, over 189 metric tons or the rough equivalent of 9,450 Hiroshima-size bombs. Sixty percent of the drum-type containers holding HEU have never been opened. In fact, some HEU materials have been in their original storage containers for almost 40 years.
A very large amount of these are stored in decades-old wooden buildings vulnerable to fire and which provide little protection from tornadoes and earthquakes. Oak Ridge lies within the New Madrid fault area, which experienced one of the country's most convulsive earthquakes early in the nineteenth century.
Lack of urgency
The possibility of criticality accidents at the Oak Ridge, Hanford, Rocky Flats, Idaho, Los Alamos, Livermore, and Savannah River sites is a major worry. A criticality occurs when a relatively small amount of fissile material (as little as half a kilogram of plutonium or highly enriched uranium) is concentrated and starts a nuclear chain reaction that sets off a burst of radiation with a characteristic blue flash.
While not as catastrophic as reactor meltdowns, nuclear criticalities are among the most serious accidents in the nuclear industry. (Last September, the worst nuclear accident ever to occur in Japan was a criticality event.) Eight out of nine U.S. criticality accidents occurred at federal nuclear facilities.
Energy Department schedules to correct unsafe nuclear material storage and processing situations at Oak Ridge and elsewhere continue to slip be-cause—as the agency claimed last fall—costs are higher than expected and because delays are simply a fact of life.
One vast experiment
On February 3, 550 Energy Department workers and former workers or their survivors showed up at a meeting in Richland, Washington, to bear witness to the hazards of making plutonium for nuclear weapons at the nearby Hanford reservation. It was a seminal event for this company town, well known for its collective deference to authority on “national security” matters.
Just five days earlier, the New York Times reported: “After decades of denial, the government is conceding that workers who helped make nuclear weapons … were exposed to radiation and chemicals that produced cancer and early death.” Now it was all right to speak publicly of dark secrets seldom even shared with family members. Among those who spoke at the Rich-land meeting was Kay Sutherland who, according to the Los Angeles Times, lost four members of her family to disease:
“The people in this area have been forced into poverty because they've had to retire in their 30s, 40s and 50s, too young to get a retirement, too young to get Social Security. They fall through the cracks, and they die.” Sutherland said she had had four miscarriages, that her liver was enlarged, and that she had multiple tumors. “I am a holocaust survivor from the American Cold War.”
On April 12, the Clinton administration—expanding on an earlier Energy Department plan to compensate nuclear weapons workers who have contracted an incurable beryllium disease—introduced legislation to compensate workers in Ohio and nine other states for a variety of ailments linked to their exposure to radiation during the Cold War. If approved by Congress, the plan would offer workers or their survivors lump-sum payments of at least $100,000.
The administration has also prepared a draft study that summarizes previous epidemiological studies conducted by the department and by its predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission (aec). The conclusion: Radiation and toxic materials have had adverse health consequences on an unknown number of workers and former workers.
From the 1940s to the present, the aec and the Energy Department were aware that large numbers of workers were being overexposed to radiation. In December 1951, the AEC's Advisory Committee on Biology and Medicine told the AEC chairman: “Cancer is a significant industrial hazard of the atomic energy business…. The Committee recommends the cancer program be pursued as a humanitarian duty to the nation.” The plea was not heeded.
Recent disclosures by the Washington Post show that workers at the Paducah facility were deliberately kept in the dark about exposures to dangerous radioisotopes, such as plutonium 239. The Energy Department and its contractors chose not to tell the workers because the unions would demand hazardous-duty pay. Now the government faces a much larger potential liability from a growing number of sick workers documented by its own studies.
The Energy Department's studies cover some 600,000 people and go back more than 50 years to when the first nuclear weapons were made during World War II. Robert Stone, the head of the Health Division of the Manhattan Project, noted shortly after the war: “The whole clinical study of the personnel is one vast experiment. Never before has so large a collection of individuals been exposed to so much irradiation.”
Workers at 14 Energy Department facilities have increased risks of dying from various cancers and non-malignant diseases following exposure to radiation and other substances, according to the draft summary of the studies, which has not yet been released.
“This is the first time that the government is acknowledging that people got cancer from radiation exposure in the plants,” Richardson told the New York Times, in reference to the draft study.
The number of workers affected may range between several hundred to several thousand. These workers and former workers have a powerful advocate in Bill Richardson. But his time in office is limited as the Clinton administration winds down.
What form of justice, if any, America's Cold War veterans will get in the post-Richardson era is anybody's guess.
—R. A.
The Defense Nuclear Facility Safety Board, a panel established by Congress in 1988 to oversee the department's nuclear safety activities, issued a stinging rebuke last November 15. The department's previously “acknowledged urgency seems no longer to be recognized.” The rationale for delay was “disingenuous” and “implies no particular concern as to the growing hazards associated with these unstable materials, although it is now five years since the Board drew attention to the need for their prompt stabilization.”
Energy Department facilities are in the same legal category of potential high-consequence operations as nuclear power plants. However, unlike commercial reactors, which are externally regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Energy's contractors regulate themselves. This is not the way it's supposed to be.
In 1988, Congress required the Energy Department to establish a nuclear safety enforcement program that included fines, penalties, and criminal sanctions against contractors who violate nuclear safety regulations. Eleven years later, the department's Office of Environment, Safety and Health, which is responsible for hundreds of nuclear facilities, has a staff of six people and is almost totally dependent on the self-reporting practices of contractors. Only two nuclear safety regulations have been formalized and very few penalties have been issued.
Last July, the Energy Department promised Congress that it would issue a sweeping nuclear safety regulation by October 1999. As of early April, the regulation was still “under review.”
Process as product
As Secretary Richardson's senior policy adviser, I was troubled that so little support was given to Energy's Office of Environment, Safety, and Health in its battle to oversee and enforce safety at departmental sites.
1984: A worker at the Paducah plant in Kentucky maneuvers one of Energy's 46,000 cylinders filled with uranium hexafluoride gas.
Instead, there were endless meetings with department managers who insisted on a consensus before safety measures were adopted. In the real world, an insistence on consensus is a recipe for inaction—or actions at the level of the lowest common denominator. Process became product while people's lives were at stake.
On July 28, 1998, a worker was killed and several others severely injured when a high-pressure carbon dioxide fire suppression system unexpectedly went off in a facility at the department's Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory.
Within seconds 13 workers found themselves struggling to escape a lethal atmosphere under zero visibility. The rescue team was put at great risk as they entered the building without breathing equipment. “It's taken one life. We're lucky it didn't take more,” said one of the injured workers.
1984: A 75-foot-long “line of sight” pipe running from the “zero room” for the “Misty Rain” test shot, Nevada Test Site.
An investigation found that the accident could have been avoided. Several similar accidents at the laboratory, including two very serious ones, had been ignored. The investigators concluded that management “had not been aggressive or effective in monitoring contractor performance … or in ensuring that corrective actions and improvements in hazard and work controls are completed or consistently applied.”
Later that year, the Idaho site manager on whose watch the accidents occurred sought bonuses for the good work he and his colleagues had done. Secretary Richardson caught wind of this and blocked the bonuses. Undeterred, on September 22, 1999, the manager, who by now held a senior position at headquarters, sent an e-mail message opposing a safety rule that a secretarial safety panel was to decide on the next day.
“The implementation of nuclear safety enforcement regulations,” he said, “could have a detrimental effect…. We place a significant burden on our contractors … yet we seek to impose a more onerous environment of more fines and penalties…. I believe that we should put our energy into the carrots and demonstrate to our critics that it works.”
A week later, the manager went to work for British Nuclear Fuels Limited, which had a $1 billion contract at the Idaho lab that he was instrumental in approving.
Pantex nightmares
The revolving door between Energy Department officials and contractors is a time-honored tradition in which distinctions are often blurred between the overseer and the overseen. Those who rock the boat, particularly about safety, not only foreclose future lucrative employment opportunities with Energy Department contractors, but they also face demotion while at the department.
Frank Rowsome, a senior Energy Department safety expert, referred to that problem in a February 28 dissenting safety report that focused largely on the Pantex plant near Amarillo, Texas.
“The case of DOE's nuclear weapons program has been made particularly acute by some vicious circles,” he wrote. “Those of us who help to cover up deficiencies are rewarded, and those that bring them to the fore … are at best ignored, resented, or dismissed as troublemakers.”
In his February dissent, Rowsome said that Energy Department officials heavily censored safety reports while engaging in wholesale removal of safety experts from the nuclear weapons management chain. “No one in our management hierarchy is a safety professional today,” he said. Many safety professionals “are disaffected and are seeking to leave.”
Like Rowsome, I observed a relentless effort in recent years by Energy Department officials, including political appointees, to water down the nuclear safety regime introduced in the late 1980s after the Chernobyl accident. As a result, safety experts now have to report to managers who are primarily concerned about deadlines, costs, and—most important—preserving Energy's isolated and privileged management culture.
Over the years, many thousands of nuclear weapons and weapons components have been transported to the Pantex plant (by people like Jim Bailey) for dismantlement and reassembly, or—in recent years—just plain dismantlement. Pantex is one of the most potentially dangerous operations in the world.
The work at Pantex is done almost entirely by hand. Typically, three to five technicians work on a weapon in a bay with an elaborate set of instructions that must be strictly followed using specialized tools for each weapon system.
To dismantle a weapon, workers must often bypass or disable safety features installed to prevent accidental detonation. In a number of instances, writes Rowsome in his February dissent, the wrong tools or procedures were used on weapons. On one occasion, for instance, technicians connected an electrical tester to an intact nuclear weapon; the procedure called for connecting the tester to a component—after it had been safely removed.
“None [of these procedural lapses] has produced a severe accident, thus far, but some have done serious damage to the nuclear weapons. These certainly qualify as close calls,” says Rowsome.
Safely dismantling and assembling nuclear weapons requires having a formal system in place that constantly guards against situations that could lead to human error and accidents. Equally important is the need to fully instill an understanding of the consequences if things do go wrong. This is how commercial airlines, nuclear power utilities, NASA, and the Defense Department try to ensure maximum safety. However, these mainstream safety systems were constantly thwarted at Pantex by Energy Department managers, says Rowsome.
Nuclear weapons are more vulnerable to severe accidents than experts believed a few years ago, he says. For instance, research sponsored by San-dia National Laboratory shows that “Zone 12 at Pantex in which nuclear weapons are worked receives a lightning strike typically two or three times a year…. Such a strike might well detonate the chemical explosive and there is a chance that … [the explosion] could produce a low-yield nuclear detonation.”
Also, he says, experts no longer maintain that a fire could not lead to a nuclear detonation of consequence. While the possibility is still remote, and the explosion itself would be a low-yield fizzle, the possibility remains. In the past few years there have been “a flock” of near misses at Pantex. Rowsome writes:
“We have seen nuclear weapons accidentally destroyed but not exploded at Pantex in recent years. We might see an accident in which the chemical high explosive is detonated or burned while still in a nuclear weapon. That would destroy one bay or cell at Pan-tex, and kill the technicians … and possibly a few outside.” Rowsome believes that an accidental nuclear detonation, even if it is a fizzle, would have much more serious consequences:
It “would destroy Zone 12 at Pantex, and kill the several hundred workers there, and induce the chemical explosive to go off in a few dozen other nuclear weapons, but probably not detonate them. It would produce radioactive fallout not unlike those resulting from one of our above ground nuclear weapon tests in the 1940s and 1950s.”
Higher-yield nuclear explosions are substantially less likely, he says, but they could create more radioactive fallout because they might “vaporize the many plutonium pits” stored at the site.
Rowsome suggests that Pantex should be shut down until its safety problems are corrected. But, he concludes, “management maintains that nuclear detonation is incredible at Pantex—and so not worth thinking about or analyzing or being prepared for. The NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission] similarly maintained that core melt accidents were incredible and not worth analyzing and not worth being prepared for at nuclear power plants—until one happened at Three Mile Island.”
The recycling gambit
For nearly 50 years the Energy Department and its predecessors have insisted that low doses of radiation do not cause human harm. There are even some within the department who staunchly believe that small doses of radiation are good for the body.
Regardless of where the scientific truth lies, Energy has little credibility on the matter because of its long history of misleading the public about radiation dangers. When Energy's predecessor, the Atomic Energy Commission, was exploding nuclear weapons in the open air in Nevada in the 1950s, officials referred to radioactive fallout as “sunshine units.” We now know that nuclear weapons detonations at Nevada released about 150 million curies of radioactive iodine.
Eventually, a lack of public trust led to taking away Energy's control over radiation health-effects research in the early 1990s. But this has not affected a relentless 20-year effort by managers at the Oak Ridge site to recycle thousands of tons of radiation-contaminated metals into commerce.
In the fall of 1995, I found myself in a hallway facing down an angry senior Energy Department career officer after I blocked a deal that would have allowed some 10,000 tons of radiation-contaminated nickel from nuclear weapons operations to be recycled into the civilian metal supply, where some percentage of it would inevitably wind up in stainless steel items such as in-trauterine devices, surgical tools, children's orthodontic braces, kitchen sinks, zippers, and flatware. However, that confrontation was not to be the end of the scrap metal gambit.
On the eve of the 1996 elections, as a beleaguered Secretary O'Leary was battling congressional Republicans over her foreign travel expenses, Oak Ridge officials went to Vice President Al Gore's office to seek his support for the recycling project. Gore's staff was told that this was a new innovation called “reindustrialization,” which would bolster the economy in Gore's home state. The fact that reindustrial-ization meant recycling contaminated metals was played down.
Next, a press release came from the Energy Department quoting the vice president's endorsement. The release said that a $238 million sole-source contract had been awarded to British Nuclear Fuels Limited for the project. The Energy Department would save money through the use of proven recycling technology, and wastes would be converted to assets.
The recycling contract was challenged in Federal District Court by the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Last June, Judge Gladys Kessler, in a strongly worded opinion, stated:
“It is … startling and worrisome that from an early point on, there has been no opportunity at all for public scrutiny or input in a matter of such grave importance.” Calling the recycling effort “entirely experimental at this stage,” she concluded, “The potential for environmental harm is great, especially given the unprecedented amount of hazardous materials which the defendants seek to recycle.”
Members of Congress are now seeking to block the recycling effort. And in January, the Specialty Steel Industry of North America, composed of firms that recycle metals, said its members “have not and will not accept scrap that is known or perceived to be radioactively contaminated.”
1993: At the Pantex plant in Texas, nuclear weapons are disassembled in “Gravel Gerties,” which are designed to collapse if a catastrophic accident occurs
In February, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson put a hold on releasing the contaminated metal from Oak Ridge and imposed a moratorium on releases at other sites. It looks as if regulated landfills will be the next stop for the contaminated metals, and that the Energy Department will have to eat a few hundred million dollars in disposal costs.
A postscript: the Oak Ridge manager who orchestrated the BNFL recycling contract received a Presidential Meritorious Rank award in 1998, which cited his efforts to recycle the metal. The award carried a $10,000 honorarium. He retired in the summer of 1999 and is now leading a BNFL subsidiary, Westinghouse Government Services, which secured a contract to run Oak Ridge's Y-12 plant.
Apples and oranges
For an agency with such critical safety and health responsibilities, effective financial management controls are essential. The Energy Department has some 20 different contractor-cost accounting systems, an apples-and-oranges factor that makes it virtually impossible for the department to accurately estimate basic expenses such as overhead costs or to compare the performance of one contractor to that of another.
The department is a throwback to the early Cold War. It is not even as efficient as the Defense Department, which itself is no model of financial management. In the Defense Department it is at least possible to discover that a hammer costs $600 dollars— and why. In the Energy Department, it is not only impossible to know how much a hammer costs, it may be impossible to determine if the hammer even exists.
In April 1999, the department's inspector general reported that the agency “has not been successful in protecting the government against contractor-created liabilities…. As a result, the department may be liable for monetary awards resulting from … fines, penalties, third party claims, and damages to or loss of government property.”
Energy's contracting and project management has also been repeatedly and sharply criticized by the General Accounting Office (GAO) and the National Academy of Sciences. Throughout the 1990s, the GAO described the department as having “an undocumented policy of blind faith in its contractors' performance, which it called its ‘least interference policy.’”
Given that, it is not surprising that Energy's management of large, expensive, and technically complicated projects is poor. Because Energy relies on contractors to perform about 90 percent of its work, and because it lacks technical and managerial skills, it has a long history of rushing into risky and unproven technologies that fail.
At the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, where about two-thirds of the total radioactivity of the department's high-level nuclear wastes are stored in aging tanks, about $500 million was poured down the drain from 1982 to 1998 on a failed pretreatment technology for high-level wastes—de-spite 15 years of warnings that it was too dangerous and would not work.
In 1991, an independent expert panel advised against proceeding further because the project would generate large amounts of benzene, which is explosive, flammable, and carcinogenic. The department and its Savannah River contractor, Westinghouse, ignored the recommendation and proceeded to spend another $120 million before quietly giving up.
1993: Drums of low-level waste are stored outside the Fernald, Ohio, plant, where uranium metal was machined.
The Savannah wastes, which will remain radioactive for thousands of years, are in unstable liquid forms and they sit atop the Tuscaloosa aquifer, the drinking water supply for the southeastern coastal plain. The area is a major earthquake zone; in 1886, it had a quake that nearly destroyed Charlestown, just 90 miles away from the Savannah site.
Energy's failure to manage the project is a serious setback to protecting a water resource that is critical to the region and the country. Secretary Richardson fired Westinghouse from this project in the spring of 1999.
Reform or dismantlement?
The Energy Department has its share of smart, capable people who operate on a high moral plane. Similarly, a large number of contractor employees are competent and conscientious. But in both cases, the system figuratively and sometimes literally sits on them.
The system needs to be revamped. But how? Congressional efforts to reform the department often have been driven by partisan politics, pork-barrel banalities, and knee-jerk reactions to the department's failures and scandals. The creation last year by Congress of a “semi-autonomous” National Nuclear Security Administration to manage nuclear weapons activities in the department was a response to the specter of losing nuclear secrets to China.
Security concerns were serious and they had to be addressed. But creating a fortress-like agency within the department responsible for nuclear weapons is likely to exacerbate a serious problem of a different kind. As the weapons complex continues to shrink and as budget pressures mount, the new agency will predictably argue that it needs an ever larger share of Energy's budget pie to support its stewardship role while building nuclear weapons expertise for the future.
Meanwhile, the number of “orphan” Cold War-era facilities with rotting roofs and across-the-board structural decay (some of which house large quantities of dangerous materials) will grow. Remediation costs will increase with each additional year of delay.
Congress will appropriate ample money for stewardship, because in the end no politician is eager to vote against “national defense.” But the aging Cold War production facilities are so scattered and vast and their potential dangers so abstract that they are likely to remain indefinitely on a far back burner.
Such misplaced priorities are not likely to end soon. To be sure, over the years the Energy Department has established basic reforms and controls to ensure better accountability. Many recent reforms are the products of energy secretaries going back to the Reagan era. They include creating an Office of Environment, Safety and Health; contract reforms; the establishment of the Office of Environmental Management to clean up Energy Department sites; promoting external safety and health regulations; and opening the secrets of the agency to public scrutiny, particularly those that reveal how Americans were put at risk during the Cold War without their knowledge and consent.
These reforms are commendable; but in practice the results have often been disappointing. Secretaries of energy come and go and their legacies are erased or watered down while the basic dysfunctional structure of the department endures.
The Energy Department, in its current form, has outlived its usefulness. But having said that, it is not clear what should be done. Continuing with incremental reforms is one option. Dismantlement is another.
Those who advocate dismantling the department out of frustration with its people miss the point. The problem is not so much the people but an outdated and rigid system that rewards those who support the status quo while punishing those who try to change it.
Dismantlement advocates want to get rid of the department because it is an example of too much government. The conservative Heritage Foundation points to Energy's “continual empire building” and finds that “no case has been made that [Energy]'s functions must be performed in the public sector or that its programs are more valuable than the budgetary resources they consume.”
But turning over Energy Department functions to the private sector does not always work well. The Clinton administration “privatized” Energy's uranium enrichment business, which makes fuel for commercial reactors, creating the U.S. Enrichment Corporation.
In late 1998, the corporation quietly received a $300 million bailout to keep afloat a deal between the United States and Russia to purchase highly enriched uranium from Russian weapons. Now the corporation is appealing to Congress and the White House for more subsidies, while its stock value plummets. It is on the verge of shutting down one of its two operations.
Others want the department dismantled not because they have a bias against government operations but because they believe that Energy is simply not reformable. Energy “should be terminated … because it's a slovenly organization, a menace to public safety and incorrigibly immune to reform,” says Daniel S. Greenberg, a prominent and influential science writer. The department's “important functions … must continue, but they should be put under the management of government agencies that can responsibly handle complex affairs.”
The balloon mortgage comes due
Those who advocate dismantlement have a point. No other federal agency faces challenges so monumental in scale. Now that the unchecked growth that defined five decades of civilian and military nuclear energy has ended, a complex and very costly set of custodial responsibilities from America's romance with the atom are emerging. Call it the “balloon mortgage” of the Nuclear Age. For years the mortgage was hardly noticed. Now it has come due.
The Energy Department maintains the U.S. nuclear arsenal and protects its nuclear secrets while remaining responsible for the largest concentration of radioactivity in the world, which requires stewardship for hundreds of centuries. Perhaps no single agency should have so many missions and be in charge of solving so many different problems and running so many programs. But if the department is to be dismantled and its duties farmed out, several major questions will have to be answered first.
1984: Red-hot uranium ingots are squeezed into tubes at the Ashtabula, Ohio, plant.
• When commercial landfills for low-level radioactive materials close, who will assume the federal custodial responsibility for them, as required by law?
• Deregulation of the electric utilities industry is hastening the closure of nuclear power plants. Who will be responsible for the growing backlog of spent nuclear fuel and the dismantled reactors? Who will make up possible funding shortfalls in reactor cleanup?
• How will more than 700,000 metric tons of nuclear materials, including over half of all the uranium mined in the world, be stabilized and disposed of?
• Who will ensure that billions of cubic meters of environmental contamination plus large amounts of unstable radioactive wastes in leaking containers won't damage water supplies and regional ecosystems?
• How will major Energy Department sites be closed when they currently dominate the wage and benefit structure of large areas of the country?
• Who will come to terms with the human health legacy of the Cold War—such as nuclear workers made ill by working in weapons production plants?
• How will Energy's current activities be regulated to protect the environment, the safety, and the health of all Americans?
• How will we pay for all of the above, plus much more?
Beyond these specific concerns, there are profound policy issues linked to the other one-third of the department's budget—global warming, basic energy science, energy-efficiency standards, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and the vulnerabilities of a country that depends on foreign suppliers for more than half of its oil and nuclear fuel.
None of these questions has been systematically addressed in the debates over the possible dismantlement of the Energy Department. But the answers will have profound implications for the U.S. government, the American people, and for the world.
The future of the Energy Department is far too important to be left to the kind of decision-making that confuses do-something-now restructuring with actually addressing the underlying questions.
Coming to terms with the fate of the Energy Department will ultimately require defining and thinking through policies governing national security, energy, and the economic and environmental quality of large areas of the United States for years to come.
To put it simply, a rush to dismantle the Energy Department would be a classic put-the-cart-before-the-horse response. We must first come to grips in a general way with the fundamental questions the Energy Department deals with on a daily basis.
Once that is done, we will have a rough guide as to how the department might be reshaped or even dismantled.
But until we come to grips with these fundamental questions, it will be business as usual at the Energy Department. And in the twenty-first century, that is not good enough.