The DOE's dirty laundry: is a technologically unqualified DOE sabotaging its own nuclear cleanup efforts?

Remember the savings and loan bailout? You know, the banking fiasco with the $90 billion price tag? Well, that'll look like chump change next to the government's next big repair job: reversing 50 years of environmental ruin in the nation's nuclear weapons complex. Cleaning it up is expected to take at least 75 years and $230 billion--more than twice what the S&L debacle has cost so far.

It's not a pretty picture. Radioactive waste oozes from crumbling, million-gallon tanks--some in danger of exploding--at two dormant federal reactors, Hanford in Washington state and Savannah River in South Carolina. At Fernald, a derelict nuke plant near Cincinnati, there are silos crammed with red-hot uranium tailings. At Rocky Flats, a defunct warhead factory in the suburbs of Denver, the ground is spiked with plutonium. And just outside Idaho Falls, people go to sleep at night worrying about the radioactive waste buried under the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. It has a half-life of several thousand years.

This is the price we have yet to pay for winning the Cold War. We built a lot of nukes. We built them fast. And we didn't worry about keeping things tidy. The resulting clean-up problems are among the toughest on earth. In many cases, the tools and techniques needed to make things right haven't been invented.

Given that, it's a bit discouraging to hear some of the stories coming out of the Department of Energy, the federal agency directing the clean-up. They suggest the DOE lacks the scientific savvy to get the job done.

In 1993, for instance, a worker at Hanford used a "rock on a rope" to clear a drain clogged with radioactive gunk, according to a report from the General Accounting Office (GAO). The worker contaminated himself and brought pollution sampling at Hanford to a virtual halt for half a year. At another plant, a worker opened a fan housing in a ventilation duct and inhaled a blast of plutonium dust. In still another, supervisors put lunch rooms in radiologically-controlled zones.

The problem isn't limited to the rank-and-file. A third of the DOE's 44 top-level managers responsible for protecting workers from radiation--jobs that require a technical degree in the private sector--lack any scientific degree whatsoever, according to John Crawford Jr., a nuclear engineer and recently-retired member of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal panel that monitors safety at the DOE's nuclear weapons plants. They either have a bachelor's degree in a non-technical major or no college degree at all. "This is a problem that urgently needs attention," Crawford says. "You can't be an effective performer unless you know what you're doing"

Crawford is not the first to express concern:

1989: An advisory committee on nuclear safety warned that DOE decision-makers were frustrated by "buffers of people who are not technically competent"

1991: Then Energy Secretary James Watkins warned President George Bush that the "technical knowledge and skills of many DOE managers and employees are not sufficient to do their jobs"

1993: The Office of Technology Assessment said the DOE's environmental restoration unit "has little capacity to assess contractors' performance in health and safety matters"

1996: The GAO fretted that technical problems at the DOE's Hanford site "have gone uncorrected for considerable periods, either because managers were unaware of the problems or because they were slow to take action on problems they knew about"

In February of last year, a special committee of the National Research Council rated the DOE's cleanup effort below average at best. The performance of the DOE's Office of Environmental Restoration, the committee said, "falls short, not only of the ideal, but of the standard of reasonable effectiveness set by other organizations in both the public and private sectors"

In the DOE's defense, the cleanup problems it faces today were a half century in the making. Department officials wince just thinking about the weapons plants built in the '40s, when the work was done in extreme haste, with little regard for the environment. Back then, American leaders thought Germany was on the verge of building the world's first atomic bomb. President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the Manhattan Project, convening the nation's best scientists and giving them virtually free rein to do as they saw fit--as long as they built the A-bomb first. The government paid staggering sums to build reactors and bombs at breakneck speed, and eventually won the race.

After the war, the Atomic Energy Commission inherited the Manhattan Project plants, many already falling apart, their grounds badly polluted. These plants wound up inside the DOE after its founding in 1977.

For years the department relied on the technical prowess of its hired contractors, often limiting itself to administrative duties. This approach worked fine at first, mainly because the DOE didn't have to worry about complying with environmental laws. It said making the nukes was an issue of national security, which took precedence over everything else.

This started to change in the mid-'80s. The nation had all the nukes it needed, and the bomb factories were on their last legs. Then came the federal court ruling in 1984 that led the department to submit to federal and state environmental laws. Shortly thereafter, the Cold War ended, and the DOE's central mandate shifted from the production of nuclear weapons to cleaning up the 10 major sites and scores of smaller ones in its crumbling network.

The department didn't realize what it was getting into. It had basically ignored the world's toughest antipollution laws for years. Then, virtually overnight, it had to follow them to the letter. After years of hands-off management, it was a rude awakening for DOE managers out in the field. They had to learn a tangle of new laws, and more importantly, they had to grapple with a hardcore science problem: how to design safe procedures for cleaning up some of the dirtiest sites on earth. This meant finding a way to scoop up the waste (without contaminating anyone), stabilizing it in some form, such as encasement in glass blocks, then finding a safe place to store it. So far, most procedures are still in the experimental phase.

Not that it matters. The department has had little luck even getting to the cleanup stage. To date, its efforts have been largely limited to prep work: characterizing or describing waste found at a site. But even that isn't going smoothly: "After more than 10 years and about $260 million invested in trying to characterize the tank wastes at Hanford, little definitive progress has occurred," the GAO said in January 1996.

Nor is there much optimism that the situation will improve any time soon. "The department is running in place and spending $4 billion a year to do it," the National Research Council said the same month, "and this figure will grow if nothing is done"

DOE officials bristle at that kind of talk, saying the department is grappling with numerous non-technical issues hampering cleanup efforts. Undersecretary of Energy Thomas Grumbly says the department has to devote $48 billion of its $6 billion annual cleanup budget just to keeping things safe and stabilized--monitoring waste tanks for noxious gases, keeping rain and burrowing animals out of the tanks--leaving just $1.2 billion a year for actual cleanup.

Other analysts stress the tangled agreements that govern cleanup at the big sites. For example, in the late '80s and early '90s, DOE managers at Hanford had to negotiate and renegotiate an agreement to the satisfaction of two counter-parties, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology. Simultaneously, it had to draw up strategies to get in compliance with a host of federal laws, including Superfund, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.

The result is a case of too many cops: Cleanup requirements are being applied willy-nilly by a gaggle of regulators, both federal and state, under a dizzying array of statutes and environmental rules. DOE managers get caught between conflicting demands. At many sites, efforts to comply with multiple, often repetitive regulations result in vast redundancies in the work performed, from report generation to sampling rates to testing.

To complicate matters, the department has in a sense been betrayed by the system. There's a perverse incentive to keep cleanups going forever, because when the cleanup ends, so does the funding. "[Technical ability] is not the central problem behind the cleanup," says Andrew Caputo, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The larger problems are unsexy issues of incentives and management"

While these side issues are certainly legitimate, they shouldn't obscure what the Safety Board--the one group that spends all its time studying DOE nuclear issues--has said time and again: that a lack of technical horsepower is the DOE's single biggest problem.

Crawford hopes this message is finally sinking in. "We're not saying the DOE doesn't have enough people," he says, "We're saying it doesn't have enough people who are technically qualified"

Over the years, the DOE has responded to such criticisms by beefing up its in-house training. With 29 of its offices offering training of some sort, the department lays out hundreds of millions of dollars a year on a dizzying array of programs, ranging from the essential (worker safety and cleanup tactics) to the not-so-crucial (assertiveness training and business writing).

Ironically, most of this money is spent on the DOE's huge contractor workforce--contractors supposedly hired because they already knew what they were doing. The DOE's contract staff numbers 118,00(: (dwarfing the department's 19,000-member employee base), and includes some titans of US industry: Allied Signal Inc., Bechtel Group Inc., Lockheed Martir Corp., Raytheon Co., Rockwell International Corp TRW Inc., and Westinghouse Electric Corp.

But the DOE can't tell you how much it spend training workers at these companies. There is no central database that tallies DOE training outlays, so the department isn't sure what it's getting for its money.

Nor do the training dollars being spent on department employees seem to go toward the essentials. For instance, every year--in addition to its in-house training expenditures--the department foots the bill for dozens of high-priced seminars in management fads, things like "Total Quality Management" and Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" Congressional investigators have gotten wind of these outlays, and they want to know more. In a Dec. 20, 1995, letter, the then-chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, Pennsylvania Republican William Clinger Jr., requested information from Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary on all training since January 1, 1993, performed outside the department for the benefit of executive-level DOE employees. The DOE responded to Clinger's request with a stack of folders six inches thick. A rough survey of these documents found that the DOE paid for at least 48 Covey seminars between 1993 and 1995. The total bill for these sessions: $528,075.

DOE officials say this training boosts teamwork and efficiency. "It has saved amazing amounts of time and money," says Tara O'Toole, the DOE's assistant secretary for environment, safety, and health.

That may well be the case. But Crawford and others still wonder if it wouldn't be a better idea to use some of those training dollars to hire more scientists and others who actually know what they're doing right from the start. Who cares if DOE bureaucrats are highly effective people if front-line workers and managers don't know what they're doing?

In a 1993 recommendation, the Safety Board urged the DOE to identify its technical needs and hire outside experts. The DOE made efforts in this area: For instance, it drew up detailed requirements for 23 key job titles ranging from "chemical processing specialist" to "nuclear safety systems engineer" This was a step forward. In the past, requirements varied significantly from one field office to the next.

But progress has been slow. In 1995, the DOE filled just 33 of 400 slots reserved for technical specialists. And DOE staffers told the Safety Board in January 1996 that most people hired for technical posts have come from inside the department. Department officials say their efforts are dependent on employee turnover, and will start to bear fruit in the next year or two.

Crawford calls this so much dilly-dallying. You can argue forever about rates of retirement and civil service rules and the merits of promoting from withe in, he says, or you can do what's right: Recruit technical experts from private industry, then give them enough money and support to get the job done.