Report faults U.S. over Hanford wells

YAKIMA — The U.S. Department of Energy has been too slow to decommission abandoned and unused wells at south-central Washington's Hanford nuclear site, a new federal audit concludes.

Thousands of wells have been drilled at Hanford to monitor the release of contaminants to groundwater during decades of plutonium production for the nation's nuclear-weapons arsenal. Many of the wells have been abandoned and could pose a threat to the environment as a potential travel source for contaminants to groundwater and the nearby Columbia River.

State law requires unused and abandoned wells to be decommissioned — filled with grout or a similar substance to stop water or contaminants from passing.

But the Energy Department has not decommissioned those wells at Hanford in a timely manner, leaving the agency open to potential enforcement actions by the state, the Energy Department's inspector general concluded in an audit released yesterday .

The audit recommends that the Energy Department conduct a complete inventory, verify the status of all wells at Hanford and assess their risks, then develop a plan to decommission wells and allocate money to do so.

The Energy Department agreed to take those steps in a Dec. 9 letter by Paul Golan, acting assistant secretary for environmental management, in response to a draft of the audit.

Of the approximately 7,000 wells at Hanford, the report estimates that as many as 3,500 are unused and must be decommissioned as soon as possible.

The Energy Department estimated the total number of wells to be decommissioned at the site is 2,150, based on a 2002 plan for accelerated cleanup at Hanford. Auditors, however, increased that number based on more recent data from 2003 and 2004, according to the report.

The agency had planned to decommission 520 wells by the end of 2006, but about 33 percent of the 133 wells identified for decommissioning in 2004 were not completed, the report said.

Energy Department officials also said a lack of money had limited their ability to speed the process. The audit did not dispute that assertion but concluded that the lack of a risk-based schedule for the work likely contributed to reduced funding.

The Energy Department has estimated that 80 square miles of Hanford's groundwater have been contaminated at levels exceeding state and federal drinking water standards. An estimated 442 billion gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste have been released into the ground at the site.