Report: Energy Dept. Wasted $3.4B
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 6:52 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Energy Department has wasted much of the $3.4 billion it has spent over the last decade on developing new technology for cleaning up nuclear weapons waste, says a report of the House Commerce Committee's Republican majority.
The report, released Wednesday, said the DOE's Office of Science and Technology has ``squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on technologies that have not proved useful'' in the massive cleanup effort.
Congress created the technology development program in 1989 in hopes that it would help the government deal with the environmental legacy left from a half-century of nuclear bomb making.
The cleanup and restoration is expected to cost almost $200 billion and take more than 70 years to complete.
Carolyn Huntoon, DOE's assistant secretary for environmental management, called the science and technology development program essential to the long-term cleanup effort and disputed claims that the program has not produced results.
``One out of five research and development projects have resulted in a viable technology being used by the department,'' she said in a statement in response to the Commerce Committee staff finding. The report was compiled by staff members of the committee's Republican majority with no participation by Democratic members.
Another senior department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, admitted that much of the early funding did not produce immediate payoffs in the highly complex cleanup effort that in many cases requires technology that is not readily available.
But the official insisted ``we've turned the corner'' with development of about 180 technologies that have been commercialized as a result of the DOE science and technology program, with many going into actual cleanup efforts.
This official cited, as examples, a new technology expected to save $3 billion in the cost of cleaning up contaminated groundwater at the Fernald weapons site in Ohio and a ``sludge washing'' technology expected to save $5 billion at the Hanford weapons facility in Washington state.
Nevertheless, the Commerce report said that of the nearly 1,000 technologies developed by the program, few have yet been put to use.
It cited 80 technologies funded through the DOE program to try to deal with the cleanup of 177 tanks of toxic and hazardous waste at Hanford, perhaps the most perplexing and dangerous cleanup challenge facing the government.
Based on a survey by the committee last March, the 80 commercially available technologies ``have provided no significant use for characterizing or stabilizing the Hanford tank wastes ... and are unlikely to be useful in the future.''