The Department of Energy (DOE) manages one of the largest environmental programs in the world, including 130 sites and facilities in over 30 states and territories, the legacies of World War II and of the Cold War. The purpose of environmental management at DOE is to reduce health and safety risks associated with radioactive and hazardous waste and contamination resulting from the production, development, and testing of nuclear weapons. This section offers recommendations on the use of comparative risk for priority-setting and budgeting.

FINDING 6.5.1: The massive program of cleanup of nuclear-weapons production and waste sites has historically lacked a risk-based approach. Since late 1993, DOE has established a process that is committed to relating risks and risk reduction to budget and programmatic priorities. DOE's Environmental Management Program (DOE/EM) established six strategic goals: to address truly urgent risks, to ensure worker safety, to assume managerial and financial control, to become outcome-oriented, to focus on technology development, and to become more customer- and stakeholder-oriented. The effort is experimental and is a highly desirable input to the annual budget request and appropriation.

RECOMMENDATION: The 2½-year initiative of DOE/EM, stimulated by Congress, to learn to assess and manage the entire environmental program from a risk perspective should be continued and should be examined as a model for the EPA Superfund program (see section 6.1.2.4).

RATIONALE

The DOE sites are large, numerous, and complex; they include radioactive wastes, diverse chemical wastes, mixed radioactive and chemical wastes, and contaminated and dilapidated facilities, and they have special nuclear materials that need to be decommissioned. The program is one of the largest "discretionary" federal budget items, having grown from $2.3 billion in FY 1990 to $6.5 billion in FY 1994 before beginning a "down-sizing." It is complicated by signed agreements with numerous states and EPA (tri-party agreements) and signed agreements with American Indian nations that have treaty rights to large areas of particular sites. Those agreements, a legacy of the Bush Administration, used technical know-how at the time and empowered the states to make potent claims on federal responsibility. All parties acknowledge that there remain major uncertainties about the nature, extent, and remediability of major components of those sites, let alone a final selection of a permanent nuclear waste repository site.

DOE Secretary Hazel O'Leary, at Hanford Summit I in September 1993, committed the department to complying with occupational and environmental requirements of sister federal agencies (OSHA and EPA) and to taking dramatic steps to override the 50-year history of secretive operation of the nuclear-weapons program. She and Assistant Secretary Thomas Grumbly called on the scientific community to join the effort with fresh ideas and capabilities. Grumbly reiterated that request at a National Research Council workshop commissioned by DOE to determine whether DOE needed to identify new institutional mechanisms to develop "objective, neutral, systematic, and iterative risk-based analysis" for DOE sites. Within 60 days, the Research Council committee issued Building Consensus Through Risk Assessment, supporting the DOE plan (NRC 1994b). That report highlighted the inclusion of cultural, socioeconomic, historical, and religious values in a new risk-based approach that incorporated public involvement at each step. Eventually, DOE funded the Consortium for Risk Evaluation with Stakeholder Participation (CRESP) and several smaller academic groups and consulting firms to work with all stakeholders, including DOE. Commissioners Goldstein and Omenn are among the founders and leaders of the consortium.

Simultaneous with this long-term institution-building, the conference report of the Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee for FY 1994 stated that DOE "needs to develop a mechanism for establishing priorities among competing clean-up requirements" and submit a report to Congress by June 30, 1995. DOE mobilized a major effort to describe and characterize its major activities on risk data sheets and submitted its summary of the results in Risks and the Risk Debate: Searching for Common Ground, The First Step (DOE 1995) in timely fashion. The DOE Environmental Management Advisory Board endorsed this draft risk report as an important first step in linking risk data with compliance considerations for use in budget decisions; it also recommended improvements in data quality, review, public involvement, and consistent interpretation of data in light of future land-use planning and long-term cost projections.

DOE/EM followed up in late 1995 and early 1996 by substantially reworking its risk-data-sheet approach and then integrating it with the EM 1998 budget process. Risk data sheets now rank the significance of each DOE activity in terms of seven considerations, the first three of which are specific risk factors: public safety and health, site-personnel safety and health, environmental protection, compliance with applicable laws and regulations, mission impact, reduction of the "mortgage"of remaining cleanup obligations, and social, economic, and cultural impacts. For every activity, each of the seven considerations is ranked high, medium, or low; definitions of those evaluations are somewhat uncomfortable and cumbersome. DOE regional and site managers develop the rankings and data to support the 1,400 risk data sheets but substantial efforts to involve stakeholders in both criteria definition and risk-data-sheet quality assurance are evolving. The entire risk-ranking process is being reviewed externally and internally at DOE. Congress, this Commission, and most others regard this unprecedented process as a worthy start. DOE should balance the need to formalize the process quickly with the need to keep it fluid until its elements became coherent. Many suggestions for improvement are being assessed for incorporation.

FINDING 6.5.2: DOE sites represent an important opportunity to evaluate potential risks to workers from remediation activities.

RECOMMENDATION: DOE should actively develop means to integrate and evaluate worker risk into their decision-making process concerning the choice and timing of remediation options.

RATIONALE

EPA has seldom evaluated worker risks at Superfund sites. This omission results partly because workers often do not reside locally and therefore do not participate in the risk-assessment or remedial decision, and partly because workers receive a benefit--their jobs and their pay--which does not accrue to the community at risk. In contrast, DOE sites are generally in remote communities where the remediation workers are or become part of the community at risk, during what is expected to be longer, sustained efforts at remediation in comparison to Superfund sites. The employment provided by the need to remediate is considered a benefit to the community.

Integrating community and remediation-worker risks provides challenges. For example, the risk to those who remove hazardous chemicals and radioactive wastes occurs only between the time that the work begins and the end of their lifetimes, while the risk to community members extends into future generations if remediation does not occur or is ineffective or insufficient. In addition, much worker risk is due to injuries and occurs in early adulthood, while much of the risk of mortality in the community is due to cancer or other diseases occurring late in life. Integrating analyses of worker- and community-health risks thus presents the challenges of accounting for different health and safety effects, different periods of exposure occurring at different times in a lifetime, and different perceptions about the risks and benefits of remediation options and cleanup standards.