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Sunday, May 9, 2004

Scientist Wants To Rank LANL Waste

By Adam Rankin
Journal Staff Writer
    John Till wants to do for Los Alamos National Laboratory what he says has never been done at any U.S. Department of Energy facility: develop a comprehensive priority list for waste cleanup that would put the most threatening sources of contamination for humans and the environment first in line to be fixed.
    He also wants to develop a process to determine the order of that list based in part on public input because, as he says, not everyone has the same tolerance for pollution.
    For the public to be truly involved, Till said every bit of environmental monitoring data from the laboratory and the state needs to made easily accessible to the public through an independent, third party and understandable so citizens can be part of the decision-making process.
    It may sound intuitive, but Till, a scientist who for the last 27 years has specialized in evaluating risk at DOE sites, said all this has never been done before.
    "This is absolutely ground-breaking for any DOE site," he said during a recent interview in Santa Fe.
    He said he's got the full support of LANL director Pete Nanos and DOE headquarters in Washington. Now, Till is trying to get the public's support.
    He said he begins every project under the assumption that he has no public credibility.
    "We will do some astonishing things with this project, and we will earn it," he said.
    That process begins May 19 when Till and his team of 16 scientists with his Risk Assessment Corp. will outline their project to the public at 6 p.m. in Pojoaque at the Cities of Gold Casino.
    Till wants to do it all— including setting up a system so the environmental data and priority list can be updated in the future— within three years and for less than $6 million, funded by the University of California, which operates LANL.
    He's off to a good start. Since March 2003, Till and his team have transformed LANL's various environmental data, which he said was a "mess," into a uniform, standard database that is easy to understand and access.
    The next stage of the project— called RACER for Risk Analysis, Communication, Evaluation and Reduction— is developing the priority list for waste cleanup.
    As reasonable as such a list might at first seem, New Mexico's environmental community recoils at the notion of a risk-based cleanup strategy, which many see as code for avoiding cleanup.
    "This is all part of a national DOE plan to avoid compliance with the law," said Joni Arends, director of Santa Fe's Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety. "We want hard and fast numbers and procedures and protection instead of these veils that are being put up that are going to reduce risk based on nothing."
    "Our big concern about this RACER project is that it will allow DOE to just pave over waste sites" by dismissing some risk as inconsequential, she said.
    Part of the problem is that Till's RACER project comes on the heels of DOE's own attempt at a nationwide risk-based cleanup strategy for its sites, called the Risk-Based End State vision.
    Its goal is to determine how clean certain waste sites need to be based on how the land will be used in the future. In many cases, such as at most of LANL's material disposal areas, plans are to monitor and leave much of the waste in place, while ensuring risk of human exposure is minimal.
    From California to Ohio, state and even federal environmental officials criticized the plans for individual DOE sites as lacking sufficient public input and for defying current cleanup agreements and regulations.
    DOE's so-called RBES process, which is still ongoing, raised the ire of environmental groups across the country because they perceived it as a way for DOE to avoid cleanup.
    Regional environmental groups, now thoroughly skeptical of risk-based approaches, have the same fears about Till's RACER project.
    "There is clearly a strong tendency on the lab's part to explain away the need for cleanup based on risk assessments in contrast to some kind of absolute cleanup standards," said Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch of New Mexico.
    "The lab's game here is that they know they've already done these calculations and there won't be serious risk (to the public) off site, so the calculation of risk will show that nothing needs to be done," said Greg Mello, director of the Los Alamos Study Group.
    State Environment Department Secretary Ron Curry also voiced his concerns that Till's work not be a substitute or interfere with the state's plans for cleanup at LANL.
    "My one concern is that a risk-based assessment should not be used as an excuse to not clean something up," he said.
    At the same time, Curry said Till has helped foster communications between the state and LANL and that his environmental database will be useful for the state, LANL and the public in the future.
    Until now, cleanup at DOE sites has been primarily driven by the need to comply with regulations, whether state or federal, and not necessarily with the goal of reducing risk, Till said.
    "This is above and beyond compliance," he said, stressing that a priority list should not interfere with current cleanup or with any public health or environmental regulations, nor should it be a means to downplay the need for cleanup.
    "If what I am doing is used as an excuse to not do something, then I will fail," he said. "It shouldn't happen if the people become involved," which isn't happening now, Till said.
    "Where in the process (for deciding cleanup) right now do stake holders have a voice? Somebody tell me," Till said. "Where are the stake holders sitting down with regulators?"
    But Mello, who said Till is both a "scholar and a gentleman" and the best man for the job, argues a potentially more powerful forum for public participation exists but is going unexercised.
    He said the state Environment Department could allow the public to engage in adversarial hearings with LANL over its various state permits "so the results could be litigated."
    "That would be real citizen involvement, because it gives power to the citizens," Mello said.
    But LANL wants people to think of themselves as partners in cleanup with the laboratory instead of adversaries, he said.
    Mello said RACER's proposed public involvement to establish a priority cleanup list means nothing because "it provides no firm standards of performance and no firm avenues for legal redress."
    For their part, LANL officials, who have committed to continuous risk reduction, are excited about the RACER project because they hope it will set a benchmark by which their environmental remediation can be checked year after year.
    "What continuous risk reduction will do more than anything is show how we can improve year after year," explained Doug Stavert, LANL's program manager for environmental protection.
    The RACER project "will allow us to show how we improve year after year," he said.
    By including the public in the process, Stavert said RACER will show people how LANL and DOE make cleanup decisions.
    "Right now, it is very difficult for the laboratory to show how we make those decisions, and frankly, some of those decisions need to be shared," he said. "We recognize that we can't do this alone as a laboratory, we need stake holders."
    Despite the criticisms and the challenge before his team, Till remains hopeful because he said there is now no systematic way for cleanup to progress at LANL.
    "Say you get a top 10 (cleanup) list, then what about the other 1,990 sites? What's the order, then?" he said.
    "LANL is saying we are going to continue to reduce risk, but you can't do that without some kind of approach, a method, like we are putting together."