Recasting Cleanup: DOE’s Legacy Waste Environmental Management Program. D. J. Bjornstad, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
The Department of Energy spends on the order of $5.5 billion per annum on its cleanup of legacy wastes, but from an objective perspective the program appears to resemble an entitlement program more closely than other elements of the nation’s environmental agenda.
The nation’s environmental protection programs find their basis in a body of legislation, the administration of which is assigned to the EPA. This legislation and the rules EPA promulgates attempt to protect human health and the environment by controlling additions to the stock of extant pollution or by reducing past additions to this stock through remediation or other types of cleanup
To guide its decisions, the EPA has developed and evolved a set of analytical tools, based on principles of risk analysis, that measure damages due to pollutants. These principles correspond loosely to the concepts of economic efficiency and equity. Economic efficiency attempts to achieve the greatest possible progress toward some objective goal, given constraints on resources available to achieve the goal. Equity attempts to achieve a "fair" distribution of burdens from pollutants, i.e., to ensure that disproportionate burdens do not systematically fall on identifiable populations subgroups
In contrast, DOE has developed a cleanup program that closely resembles a construction project with milestones and deadlines, and targets and new technologies, but no objective consideration of risks or burdens due to legacy wastes.
This paper provides a contrarian view of DOE’s cleanup that attempts to recast cleanup as an part of the nation’s environmental protection agenda. Using principles of efficiency and equity the paper provides an alternative perspective on DOE’s cleanup and attempts to provide suggestions that increase efficiency.
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