Long-Term Stewardship of DOE Legacy Waste Sites: A Status Report (2003)

The committee visited two DOE sites, Mound and Fernald, on October 31 and November 1, 2001. The sites are near each other in southwestern Ohio. During these visits, the committee talked with DOE managers, contractors, community leaders, and interested citizens. The committee also toured each site. (See Appendix C for a list of presentations and discussions.)

Mound and Fernald present striking contrasts: Managers of the two sites have taken different paths through the regulatory process resulting in different approaches to site characterization, remedy selection, and remedial action. They, along with state and local stakeholders, also have chosen different future land-use plans (industrial reuse at Mound, and open parkland at Fernald) making for stark differences in the physical, ecological, and institutional conditions in which LTS will begin.

Located near Dayton, Ohio, in the city of Miamisburg, the Mound Plant (now the Miamisburg Environmental Management Project, MEMP) manufactured radioactive components for nuclear weapons, such as neutron generators, and provided a variety of services to the Atomic Energy Commission and DOE using radioactive and stable isotopes. At its peak, the facility employed 2400 people,² and the community’s desire to find sustainable replacements for the largest employer in the area influenced the positions of local stakeholders in negotiating with DOE on both the future uses of the site and on how cleanup was to be carried out.

Hundreds of small patches of contaminated soil have been found at the site, in addition to the larger-scale problems due to landfills and ground-water contamination.

Contamination at Mound consists of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), tritium, plutonium, polonium, thorium, uranium and small quantities of some other actinides and fission products. Contamination is found both in structures and environmental media (soils, ground water, and seeps to surface water). At least one landfill on the site contains VOCs (see DOE 1996).

The current plan calls for cleanup activities at Mound to be completed in 2006, and for management of much of the site to be transferred to the Miamisburg-Mound Community Improvement Corporation (MMCIC), which is to be the site steward. This business development organization, created by local government, is developing an industrial park on the site, the Mound Advanced Technology Center. The Center is the only future use of the site considered in planning documents. The city views it as impossible that the land might convert to residential land use because the land is zoned industrial. No analyses seem to have considered the risks if zoning restrictions were to change or fail.

Some buildings on the site have already been transferred to the MMCIC and are in use, although the industrial reuse approach faces some difficulties. The MMCIC has complained that not enough of the site has been transferred to reach a threshold for viability of the industrial park. After terrorists attacked the U.S. in September 2001, security was stepped up, making it more difficult for visitors to meet with businesses even in the areas of the site released for redevelopment. The committee was told that most of the businesses that currently operate in the new industrial park are run by former Mound employees, taking advantage of the unique facilities at the site to carry out some of the same services and functions for DOE that the Mound Plant did.³

Progress toward “closure” at Mound has been accelerated by the unusual use of emergency removal authority under CERCLA (as opposed to the longer-term “remedial” actions that most of the other sites are using) and creation of an ad hoc decision making structure built around potential release sites (PRS). The intent is to enable DOE, U.S. EPA, and Ohio EPA to make triage judgments on small parcels and buildings, so that lightly contaminated buildings can be quickly returned to economic use.⁴ That building-scale focus has accelerated decontamination and release of some buildings and areas, but it has deferred planning for harder problems and left overall site characterization incomplete.⁵ The usual approach to reaching a record of decision (ROD) under CERCLA would have required a more comprehensive characterization and analysis of the site and the hazards it holds than is being obtained through the current approach. Without

adequate characterization of the site as a whole, the piecemeal cleanup may miss pockets of contamination and lead to poor understanding of the hyrdogeological behavior of the ground water.

Some of the largest technical challenges in cleaning up the site appear to have been pushed into the future: still to be determined were plans for dealing with the tritium-contaminated T Building,⁶ remediating ground water contaminated with dense nonaqueous-phase liquids (DNAPLs), and means to prevent future occupants from pumping contaminated ground water downstream from one of several onsite landfills that contain radiological and chemical contaminants.⁷ Drinking and process water are now drawn from three wells that are not currently contaminated (contaminant levels are on the order of one percent of maximum contaminant loads, MEMP 2001), and that sit directly downstream from the pump-and-treat wells that are being used to remediate contaminated ground water at the site; the persistence of the contaminants in the water is poorly understood.

There are many outstanding questions regarding the inventory of contaminants in the subsurface, including some that have not yet been asked by those in charge. Indeed, the site managers told the committee that they have not examined what data they will need to establish an environmental baseline for future monitoring.⁸ During a tour of the facility, the committee was told that plutonium contamination was suspected in a drainage swale on the site, but plans for pursuing this were vague and seemed to suggest that further investigation would be done on an as-needed basis. The site’s pump-and-treat program had removed ten times the total original estimated ground-water inventory of VOCs, by the time of the committee meeting. Yet this surprise apparently had not prompted a deeper investigation into the sources of these contaminants. Approximately $75 million is to be held in a contingency fund to deal with late discoveries of contamination.⁹

Consideration has not been given to whether dense non-aqueous phase liquids (DNAPLs) might travel through the fractured bedrock system that underlies the site and contaminate ground water beyond the site boundary. DNAPLs tend to sink in the subsurface and, unless retarded by lenses of low permeability material, are likely to end up in the bedrock. Once in the bedrock, their migration patterns are linked to the pattern of the fracture network, making off-site migration a possibility.

The parties involved would like to accelerate cleanup further (see DOE 2002d) through a covenant deferral request, which allows transfer of ownership of buildings before all required actions are completed, leaving the city to carry out demolition and cleanup activities through its own contractors. DOE would still pay for the work to be done. The city estimates that costs would be dramatically lower and timelines would be shorter because the city does not have the contract procurement requirements DOE has. U.S. EPA and some local residents expressed reservations about this approach at the time of the meeting, stating concerns that city contractors might not exercise the care required for work on the site.

At the time of the committee meeting, the MMCIC had a $50 thousand annual budget for long-term stewardship, which covers only the annual review and the report costs for parcels of land that have already been transferred to the MMCIC. DOE-Ohio at the same time had established a post-closure stewardship (PCS) working group that was looking at the possibility that in the future, an unauthorized person might remove contaminated soil from the site, contrary to the land-use restrictions envisioned for the site. The effort had started recently and was the first of MEMP’s efforts to plan for long-term stewardship, aside from their efforts to encourage the MMCIC’s success.

The Feed Materials Production Center (now the Fernald Environmental Management Project, FEMP) is located in a mostly rural area just beyond the suburbs of Cincinnati. The facility hosted a uranium refinery and foundry that produced high-purity uranium metal for the nuclear weapons complex. At its peak, the facility employed 3000 people; at the time of the committee meeting, FEMP had a workforce of 2500 (including subcontractors), most of whom also worked for the plant while it was active.¹¹

The plant processed 227 thousand metric tons of uranium, and as much as 450 tons of that (0.2 percent) are estimated to have been released to the environment (Fluor Fernald 2001). Other contaminants on site include other constituents of radiological concern (thorium, radium, and technetium), inorganics (beryllium, cadmium, and lead), and organic compounds. Over 100 buildings that operated at the site are to have been demolished before the site is closed (see DOE 1996).

Like Mound, Fernald is a “closure site,” on the same 2006 schedule for cleanup completion. Fernald, however, is on a path to become open space: all of the production-era buildings will be demolished, and the site will be a restricted-use parkland rather than a restricted-use industrial park. The future steward of the site has not yet been identified, and funding for LTS activities for the long term is still an unresolved issue. Memory of the site and the hazards it contains are expected to be preserved through a museum and education center, along with legal restrictions on land use.

Site characterization, remedy selection, and other planning at Fernald have proceeded with an unusually high degree of involvement by a citizens advisory board (FCAB). The FCAB was established in 1993 to answer four questions: future use of the site, how clean the remediation would make it, how to make use of onsite disposal, and the priorities to be followed (see Applegate 1998a). The FCAB published a blueprint for clean-up in 1995 that proposed answers to these questions, and recommended an engineering-based accelerated schedule that helped to set a pattern for the approach to be followed elsewhere in the DOE complex.

Cleanup levels at Fernald were established through CERCLA RODs: ground-water cleanup levels are based on U.S. EPA drinking water standards using maximum contaminant loads, and soil cleanup levels based on risks for people on undeveloped parkland onsite (10^-6) and for a resident farmer offsite (10^-5).¹² As at many sites, waste and environmental media contaminated above those levels (approximately 3100 cubic yards, a small portion of the waste by volume, but a high proportion by radiation hazard) are being shipped from Fernald for disposal at other sites, such as Envirocare and the Nevada Test Site, and wastes below those levels (mostly contaminated soil, but also some building materials) are being disposed of in an engineered cell on site (DOE 2001b). Citizens in the Fernald area view keeping some (lower-hazard) wastes onsite as a way of sharing the burden of Fernald with other communities, instead of simply imposing all of Fernald’s wastes on others. Regulators and site contractors see removing high-hazard (but relatively low volume) wastes as a way to facilitate release of most of the site to low-intensity recreational use, while even the wastes remaining onsite pose an average hazard that would be modest in the event of containment failure. The ROD states that “The long-term effectiveness of the [on site disposal facility] would be ensured by federal ownership with access restrictions” (quoted in DOE 2001b). LTS was considered in decision-making for cleanup, but only implicitly. Federal ownership was regarded as the answer for long-term institutional and physical management—FCAB specifically insisted on permanent federal ownership of contaminated areas.

There is a major unresolved problem at Fernald, two above-ground silos containing radium-rich uranium ores.¹³ The working assumption is that the silos and their contents will be removed during the cleanup process now underway, but uncertainties remain in developing a technically feasible method for doing so. It is accordingly unknown when the cleanup at Fernald will be achieved, despite the 2006 closure date. In other respects Fernald appeared to the committee to have put in place a sound cleanup strategy for its contamination and wastes.

In several other ways the Fernald staff inspired confidence. DOE and contractor staff responded to questions knowledgeably and candidly, sharing assumptions (such as the attempt to use empirically determined soil distribution coefficients for uranium in a conservative fashion) and admitting where more knowledge is needed. The committee found that many of the questions it asked had already been addressed or at least explored. In addition, DOE-EM’s Office of Science and Technology was supporting new-technology development at Fernald, and the site has sought advice from acknowledged

experts. The Fernald plan also seems more comprehensive, thinking about how the site fits into the environment as the project aims to restore habitats that have been degraded by facility operations, including forest, pasture, stream, and wetland areas.

Site managers described one impediment to making progress on LTS: funds earmarked for cleanup could not be used for LTS planning, even if the cleanup goal requires LTS to follow. FCAB is now studying this problem and the FCAB has held community meetings to discuss it. The Fernald site is now actively working with stakeholders on an LTS plan.

The leading local activist group, Fernald Residents for Environmental Safety and Health (FRESH), was organized when people living next to the Feed Materials plant discovered that their water and land were contaminated, but that DOE had never disclosed the hazards. FRESH sued DOE in 1984 over environmental contamination, launching the process that has become the site cleanup. FRESH and the citizens advisory board (which includes FRESH members) are active, engaged, and knowledgeable, but it remains unclear how to sustain these organizations once the site is “closed.” During the committee’s meeting with the FCAB and other interested citizens, participants raised concerns that DOE will use LTS as an alternative to fulfilling commitments on cleanup.

If remediation succeeds, both Fernald and Mound seem to present low environmental risks even if their projected LTS activities fail (assuming that the silo wastes are relocated and properly disposed of), although this is just an impression since assessments of failure scenarios have not been carried out. Further, reaching the remediation goals at either site is far from certain: each site faces substantial challenges and unresolved issues (including the silos and uranium pump-and-treat system at Fernald, and the T Building and DNAPLs at Mound). The committee also doubts the stability and sustainability of LTS under the industrial-reuse scenario at Mound, particularly as one looks beyond the near term.

At both sites, a measure of trust has developed among the local public, site contractors, state EPA, regional EPA, and DOE in Ohio. All parties mentioned good working relationships, within which conflicts can be aired and addressed. The relationship between the local environmental watchdog group at Mound, MESH, and contractors and DOE Ohio is unusually amicable, compared to other DOE sites,¹⁴ based on individual committee members’ experience at other sites. This trust did not appear to extend to DOE HQ and budget makers, which were both regarded with greater suspicion by several participants in the meeting.

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 technological innovations the committee heard about (new instrumentation for monitoring the onsite disposal facility, sponsored by DOE/EM’s Office

of Science and Technology) indicate that the site is seeking better technical solutions and engaging the research community. The approach at Mound was to emphasize existing technologies and to avoid the need for technological innovation in cleanup. The process of releasing buildings for reuse one by one at Mound seemed to encourage managers to make do with the information and tools already available.

In its report on the Moab Site, the committee tried to encourage a more inquisitive approach to understanding problems at the site. In this respect, the committee saw activities at Fernald as more promising than those at Mound. Fernald’s work with outside experts and research programs might be a factor in (or possibly a result of) the higher quality of its technical work and its awareness of issues beyond cleanup and engineering.