The West Valley Demonstration Project Act, enacted to assist in the cleanup of the facility, was signed into law in October 1980. 3.) As vitrification nears completion, DOE and the New York State energy authority are shifting their focus to the remaining cleanup tasks—decontaminating and decommissioning structures, remediating soil and groundwater, and removing nuclear wastes stored and buried on-site, among other activities. Off-site contamination at West Valley was generally within regulatory limits in the 1980s and 1990s, according to DOE. Several Factors Are Hindering Progress on the West Valley Cleanup

Attempts to clean up West Valley are being hindered by several factors. The Department states that after cleaning up West Valley, it does not become owner of the site. According to DOE, under its proposal, (1) to settle all outstanding issues between the Department and the state, the Department would agree to assume a portion of New York State’s responsibility to pay for the disposal of the high-level waste in return for monetary and other valuable considerations from the state and (2) DOE would still have no obligation to take title to and dispose of West Valley’s high-level waste unless New York State enters into a disposal contract under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and pays the disposal fee. West Valley’s Total Cleanup Costs and Schedule Cannot Be Estimated With Reasonable Certainty Until the Future of the Site Is Agreed On

DOE’s estimates of West Valley’s total cleanup costs and a date for completing the cleanup have been uncertain and will remain so until strategic issues are agreed upon, including the extent to which the site is to be cleaned up and what it will then look like, how the land is to be used, what regulatory cleanup standards are to be used, and where the site’s nuclear wastes are to go. Funding constraints at West Valley are not unique. For West Valley, NRC is considering whether to deal with the incidental waste issue in its cleanup standards. Appendix I: Scope and Methodology

As requested, we examined (1) the status of the cleanup, (2) factors that may be hindering the cleanup, (3) the degree of certainty in the Department of Energy’s (DOE) estimates of total cleanup costs and schedule, and (4) the degree to which the West Valley cleanup may reflect, or have implications for, larger cleanup challenges facing DOE and the nation.
What GAO Found

The West Valley nuclear facility in western New York State was built in the 1960s to convert spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors into reusable nuclear fuel. New York State, the owner of the site, and the Atomic Energy Commission--the predecessor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the Department of Energy (DOE)--jointly promoted the venture. However, the timing of the venture was poor because the market for reprocessed nuclear fuel was limited and because new, more restrictive health and safety standards raised concerns about the facility. West Valley was shut down in the 1970s, and Congress enacted the West Valley Demonstration Project Act in 1980, which brought DOE to West Valley to carry out cleanup activities. This report examines the: (1) status of the cleanup; (2) factors that may be hindering the cleanup; (3) degree of certainty in the Department's estimates of total cleanup costs and schedule; and (4) degree to which the West Valley cleanup may reflect, or have implications for, larger cleanup challenges facing DOE and the nation. DOE has almost completed solidifying the high-level wastes at West Valley, but major additional cleanup work remains. These tasks, which could take up to 40 years to complete, include decontaminating and decommissioning structures, remediating soil and groundwater, and removing nuclear wastes stored and buried onsite. The following three factors are hindering DOE's attempts to clean up West Valley: (1) DOE and New York State still have not agreed on the overall future of the site, (2) NRC cleanup standards for West Valley do not exist, and (3) cleanup planning has been limited by uncertainty about where West Valley's nuclear wastes are to go. In addition, DOE's estimates of the total costs and completion date for the West Valley cleanup are uncertain because of a lack of agreement on many strategic issues affecting the site, such as the extent to which the site is to be cleaned up, what it will then look like, how the land is to be used, and what regulatory cleanup standards are to be used. DOE's plan to deal with the underground high-level waste storage tanks at West Valley has potential implications for other DOE disposal efforts.