Poison in the Vadose Zone

Press Release & Statements

Table of Contents

Preface

Executive Summary

Chapter I: Introduction to INEEL and the water resources of the region

Chapter II: Current Contamination of Aquifer

Chapter III: Future threats: Radioactive, mixed, and hazardous buried waste at INEEL

Chapter IV: Policy Considerations for Clean-up

Appendix A: The Snake River Plain aquifer

Appendix B: Maximum Contaminant Levels in Drinking Water

Appendix C: Properties of Relevant Chemicals

Appendix D: Fate of Pollutants in the Soil

Glossary

References

Water resources in many parts of the United States have been polluted and continue to be threatened with contamination from wastes dumped at sites used for nuclear weapons production.¹ Some of these water resources are of immense regional and national importance. Ironically, it was the presence of plentiful water resources that was one of the primary reasons for building nuclear weapons facilities at these locations.

Water resources are particularly scarce in the West, where the value of the land itself and its habitability depend on the availability of water. For example, much of the prolific agriculture in Idaho, on which its economy is largely built, would not be possible without irrigation water.

Idaho's Snake River Plain aquifer is among the water resources most threatened by a nuclear weapons site. The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) sits directly above this aquifer. We chose to study it as our first case study on water issues for several reasons:

• The Snake River Plain aquifer is a sole source aquifer - that is, a large number of people have no alternative local source of water.²
• The U.S. Department of Energy buried more plutonium and other long-lived radionuclides (by curies) at INEEL than at any other U.S. site. More than a metric ton of plutonium was buried in flimsy containers for about two decades. This waste is leaking and traveling much faster than anticipated towards the aquifer; some plutonium has already reached it.
• The vadose zone (the unsaturated zone between the ground surface and the water table) is contaminated, and contaminants are continuing to migrate through the vadose zone to the aquifer.³ Yet, there appears to be time, through well-designed remedial action, to protect the aquifer from the most serious problems that threaten it.
• The conclusions about INEEL could be qualitatively applied to other nuclear sites in the arid West.

Fortunately, the importance of the vadose zone has begun to be appreciated in some parts of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), which recently published a complex-wide vadose zone science and technology roadmap. The purpose of the roadmap is to determine the research needed for characterizing, monitoring, and modeling subsurface contaminant fate and transport. The roadmap report clearly states that current knowledge about the vadose zone and contaminant transport is extremely limited.⁴

This gap is one more reflection of the low priority given to scientific issues relating to environmental protection compared to nuclear weapons production within the DOE system. Furthermore, the DOE is using ignorance of the problems and the real difficulties of clean up as an excuse to leave most, possibly the vast majority, of these wastes in the ground even as it makes huge claims on the public purse in the name of clean-up.

Removing buried wastes, stopping current and future dumping, and remediating the vadose zone to the extent possible should be the central technical and policy approaches to water resource protection. A more vigorous research and development program for vadose zone remediation and a better technology selection process are also needed. We hope that this case study will be useful to the U.S. Department of Energy, the state of Idaho, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the elected representatives and their staffs in their efforts to protect a vital local, state, and national resource. The problems have been allowed to fester for so long that we have concluded that the situation calls for a fundamental institutional restructuring of the DOE's clean-up program.

This report shows that the bill for nuclear weapons production in terms of environmental and resource costs is far from being paid. The present course is likely to foist these costs on future generations in the worst way - by depriving them of clean water. We hope that this report will help inform an open, constructive, and long-overdue public debate that will lead to action to protect water resources.

Arjun Makhijani
Michele Boyd
Takoma Park, Maryland
September 2001

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