For example, operations activities are not subject to independent oversight.Įxcerpts adapted from GAO, Environmental Liability Continues to Grow, and Significant Management Challenges Remain for Cleanup Effort, May 1, 2019.Īfter spending billions of dollars over several decades to remove radioactive waste leaking from a plant where nuclear bombs were made, the U.S.
In addition, the government manages most of its cleanup work as operations activities, under less stringent requirements than other environmental remediation projects.
For example, the Hanford and Savannah River sites plan to treat similar radioactive tank waste differently, with Hanford’s efforts possibly costing tens of billions more than Savannah River’s. These clean up costs grew by $214 billion between 20 and they will continue to grow for several reasons including the lack of a program-wide cleanup strategy and reliance primarily on individual sites to locally negotiate cleanup activities and establish priorities. Two of these, the Hanford site in Washington and Savannah River site in South Carolina, have most of nuclear waste stored in tanks, which is particularly costly and complicated to treat.
This reflects cleanup cost estimates for 16 sites across the United States. The cost of cleaning up pollution from nuclear weapons manufacturing is estimated to be $377 billion.
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