The blockbuster Oppenheimer movie, based on an excellent biography,* tells the semi-tragic story of scientific superstar J. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the American project to develop the atomic bomb. But the legacy of the bomb program, which the film, already at three hours, does not address, includes nuclear waste from the weapons program, still a major problem in many parts of the country.
The place to start is where the Manhattan Engineering District built and tested the bomb itself — Los Alamos, N.M. The Associated Press late last month as the film opened reported, “The price tag for cleaning up waste from the once top-secret Manhattan Project and subsequent Cold War-era nuclear research at Los Alamos National Laboratory has more than doubled in the last seven years, and independent federal investigators say federal officials will have to do better to track costs and progress.”
The AP headline: “In a nod to Oppenheimer’s legacy, US officials vow to prioritize cleanup at nuclear lab.”
Ike White, the head of the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, which now oversees both weapons development and cleanup of the legacy weapons sites, said at a commemorative meeting at the Los Alamos National Laboratory that it was a good time to talk about the waste management legacy from the dawn of the atomic age. He said the multi-billion dollar cleanup of the waste left from the bomb program has a total cost to the government exceeded only by Social Security and Medicaid.
Also last month, the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional watchdog agency, issued a report critical of DOE’s performance at cleaning up the Los Alamos nuclear waste. GAO said the environmental management Los Alamos site management (EM-LA) “has not taken a comprehensive approach to prioritizing cleanup activities in a risk-informed manner. For example, EM-LA has not analyzed different options for achieving site cleanup objectives, as called for in GAO’s risk-informed decision-making framework, including optimization analyses that could identify how to most efficiently meet cleanup milestones. Without a comprehensive framework for prioritizing cleanup activities, EM-LA cannot be assured that it is making optimal cleanup decisions.”
DOE has “made progress in its environmental remediation, legacy waste remediation, and deactivation and decommissioning responsibilities at Los Alamos. However, EM-LA has identified risks that may contribute to increased cleanup scope, costs, and schedule, including the strained relationship between EM-LA and the state regulator, unanticipated contamination, and limited staffing capacity.” DOE has “estimated that it would cost about $7 billion to complete remaining cleanup activities at Los Alamos.”
But GAO indicated doubts about that estimate, concluding that “weaknesses in EM-LA’s oversight of contractor cost and schedule performance has limited its understanding of the progress and costs of cleanup at Los Alamos.”
Then there is Hanford, Wash., the most vexing of the waste legacies, with an 80-year history of failing to deal with a liquid chemical and nuclear brew, stored in giant tanks, some with leaks that threaten to contaminate the Columbia River, used to cool the reactors making the bomb-grade uranium and plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
The most recent news from Hanford, while welcome, is embarrassing. Hanford has long planned to imprison its noxious effluents in glass, rendering them solid and easier to handle. “Long” means they have been trying to get this technology off the ground, without results.
The Tri-City Herald reported Aug. 8, “Glass has been melted inside the world’s largest radioactive waste melter at the Hanford nuclear reservation site for the first time, more than 20 years after construction on the vitrification plant began.” The first of four melters tried to start up last October, but “was shut down with the temperature not yet at 300 degrees when a problem was discovered with the power supply to the melter’s startup heaters. Six weeks ago, the Hanford team tried again, and the device heated to 2,100 degrees F, and the first bag of glass beads was poured into the melter.
DOE recently awarded a new 10-year, $45 billion contract for the Hanford cleanup. According to the Tri-City Herald, DOE estimates that “$300 billion to $640 billion will be needed to complete the remainder of Hanford environmental cleanup by 2078.”
In Kentucky, the cleanup project is the obsolete Paducah gaseous diffusion enrichment plant. It’s on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund national priorities site cleanup list. The plant began operating in 1952 and shifted to civilian enrichment once the U.S. stopped making new nuclear weapons. It shut down for good 10 years ago. According to EPA, “More than five decades of plant operations resulted in generation of hazardous wastes, radioactive wastes, mixed (hazardous and radioactive) wastes, and other wastes. Releases of these wastes contaminated soil, groundwater, surface water and sediment at the plant and beyond the plant boundary.”
In neighboring Tennessee, Oak Ridge was a key element in the weapons program. DOE’s Office of Environmental Management is in charge of the legacy nuclear waste. Oak Ridge was the site of trials of many different reactor technologies. According to the agency, it is “focused on taking down excess contaminated facilities across the Oak Ridge Reservation, thereby eliminating risks and opening land for reuse to support expanding research and national security missions.
“Together, the projects we have planned for 2023 will continue our mission of enhancing safety and creating new opportunities for DOE and the region,” DOE project manager Laura Wilkerson said.
Finally, a success story of sorts, after a very rocky history. The Rocky Flats Plant near Denver, Colo., made plutonium pit bomb triggers that it shipped to other weapons program sites for assembly into weapons. The plant operated from 1952 to 1992, but ceased making the pits in 1989 after the FBI and EPA raided the plant, to, as the New York Times reported, “investigate charges that workers had dumped poisons into a pond that empties into a drinking water reservoir and had surreptitiously operated a hazardous waste incinerator that had been closed for safety reasons.” The plant contractor, Rockwell International, was ousted and entered a 1992 plea agreement admitting to 10 federal environmental crimes and agreed to $18.5 million in fines.”
Ultimately, in 2016, Rockwell and Dow Chemical reached a settlement of $375 million with some 15,000 nearby resident who said plutonium releases over the years endangered their health and devalued their property.
As for cleanup at Rocky Flats, that began in the early 1990s and by 2006, DOE accepted the site from the remediation contractor, Kaiser-Hill. At the time, then Rep. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) told the Associated Press, “We are, in sum, much safer than we were, and I say that as someone who lives just three miles from the site.” A DOE five-year site review last year concluded, in typical bureaucratic language, “The technical assessment found that the remedy is functioning and supports achievement of the Remedial Action Objectives in the long term.”
But the agency added a caveat: “The report concludes that a protectiveness determination of the remedy cannot be made at this time until further information is obtained regarding the potential risk of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) to human and ecological receptors.”
*American Prometheus, The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
–Kennedy Maize
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