FEATURE ARTICLE
Managing the Environmental Legacy of U.S. Nuclear-Weapons Production
Although the waste from America's arms buildup will never be "cleaned up," human and environmental risks can be reduced and managed
Kevin Crowley, John F. Ahearne
Long-Term Stewardship
As the title of this article suggests, a great deal of the environmental legacy of nuclear-weapons production may end up being managed, not eliminated. Many sites, or portions of sites, will not be remediated to levels deemed adequate for unrestricted access, and either the federal government or a state or local government will become landlords of last resort, with attendant responsibilities for protecting public and environmental health. In some cases this protection will come in the form of long-term surveillance to guard against human access or further environmental releases, and in other cases active measures such as groundwater treatment will be required. Some of these responsibilities may last indefinitely.
These long-term responsibilities have received little consideration by the cleanup program until recently, and even now "long-term stewardship" of contaminated sites is viewed as a separate activity from cleanup. Yet there is a very real trade-off between cleanup and stewardship—that is, protection against a hazard can be achieved either by eliminating it outright (through cleanup), managing it until it ceases to be hazardous (long-term stewardship) or a combination of both approaches. Over the short term, hazard management is usually less difficult and expensive than hazard elimination, but the long-term costs are not clear, and the effectiveness of long-term stewardship depends to a great extent on the continuing willingness and ability of future generations and institutions to manage the hazard, factors over which the current program has little or no control.
Given this trade-off between cleanup and stewardship, we suggest that both choices need to be put on the table when deciding on end states and remedial actions to achieve them, fully recognizing that a reliance on stewardship places a heavier burden on future generations. The use of risk-based cleanup approaches described earlier would help make these choices explicit.
There may be good reasons for relying on stewardship in some instances, especially if cleanup is not technically feasible or cost effective. Indeed, society routinely makes this choice for managing other kinds of waste, including chemically hazardous waste, although there is little or no evidence to demonstrate its effectiveness over multiple generations, and much evidence to the contrary.
Under current regulatory regimes, decisions to rely on long-term stewardship must be revisited periodically, and further actions to reduce hazards made if necessary and feasible. We believe that the ultimate success of long-term stewardship as a solution to the waste problem at DOE sites will hinge on advances in science, especially those elements of the social sciences that bear on the effective design and operation of durable institutions. There is reason to be hopeful given the rapid advances in the five decades since the Manhattan Project; yet continuing investments in building scientific and institutional capacities are essential to ensure the continued protection of people and the natural environment around these sites. The cleanup program is planned to last for several decades even under the most optimistic scenarios—consequently, wise research and development investments made today will likely pay great future dividends.
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