The West Valley site, about 30 miles southeast of Buffalo, includes an approximately 200-acre area of nuclear operations within a 3,300-acre area owned by the state of New York. (See fig. 1.) The facility began construction in 1963 as the first—and ultimately the only—commercial spent fuel reprocessing plant to be operated in the United States. A firm called Nuclear Fuel Services operated the plant, which reprocessed spent fuel from 1966 to 1972. Regulated by the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor to NRC), the plant reprocessed approximately 640 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel to recover usable uranium and plutonium. In 1972, the plant was shut down to meet regulatory changes, including more stringent seismic criteria and worker safety requirements. In 1976, facing rising estimates of the cost to modify the plant to meet the new safety requirements, the operator announced its withdrawal from the business. (A time line of historical and projected West Valley milestones is presented in app. II.) The commercial reprocessing era at West Valley left behind major environmental, safety, and health risks from multiple types of nuclear contamination at the site, including high-level wastes, radioactive buried wastes, and environmental contamination. Specific on-site radiation risks that were generated then and still exist include the following: The reprocessing building—significantly contaminated with strontium-90 and cesium-137 (both potentially carcinogenic radionuclides)—and four adjacent single-shell underground storage tanks encased in concrete vaults. These tanks originally contained about 600,000 gallons of liquid, high-level wastes generated during reprocessing. A 5-acre, NRC-licensed waste disposal area, used from 1966 to 1986. This area contains several types of buried wastes resulting from the reprocessing era, such as about a third of a cubic meter of spent fuel from Hanford’s N-Reactor; this spent fuel was buried instead of being reprocessed because the outer layer of a fuel assembly was ruptured. A storage pool originally containing several hundred spent nuclear fuel assemblies, and now containing 125 assemblies. Groundwater contamination under the reprocessing building, in the form of a plume of strontium-90 that first developed during 1968 to 1971 and was identified in 1994. Contamination in the form of cesium-137 in surface soils on- and off-site, resulting from airborne releases, identified as principally occurring in 1968. The releases were caused by ventilation failures in the plant’s main stack. The cesium contamination levels are only slightly distinguishable from background radiation levels. The contamination extends about 3.7 miles northwest from the plant stack into heavily wooded off-site areas. An inactive 15-acre, state-licensed and -managed commercial low-level radioactive waste disposal facility. This facility, which operated from 1963 to 1975, contains, among other wastes, highly radioactive wastes from naval and commercial reactors and nuclear fuel processing facilities that are buried in trenches, as shown in figure 2. The West Valley Demonstration Project Act, enacted to assist in the cleanup of the facility, was signed into law in October 1980. The act required DOE to, among other things, (1) solidify and develop suitable containers for the site’s high-level radioactive wastes; (2) transport the solidified waste to a permanent repository; and (3) dispose of the low-level and transuranic wastes created during the project. In cooperation with the state’s Energy Research and Development Authority, DOE took control of project operations in 1982. The West Valley Act and an implementing cooperative agreement divided projected operating costs between DOE (90 percent) and the state (10 percent). West Valley Nuclear Services, Inc. (now under Washington Group International, Inc.) was awarded the solidification project contract and remains the primary contractor. In carrying out its responsibilities under the act, DOE has constructed the solidification facility and conducted solidification operations—referred to as vitrification. These operations have involved (1) chemically treating the high-level wastes—a step called pretreatment—to separate out voluminous less-radioactive wastes (which are then stored as low-level wastes) and (2) mixing the remaining high-level wastes with a form of molten glass and pouring the mixture into cylindrical stainless steel storage canisters. (The canisters are shown in fig. 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. Various entities oversee West Valley under several statutes. The site was originally licensed to the operator and New York State by the Atomic Energy Commission and subsequently by NRC. For the duration of DOE’s presence, the NRC license to the state has been placed in abeyance, leaving DOE, as authorized by the Atomic Energy Act, to regulate radioactive materials at West Valley, as it does at other departmental facilities. After DOE concludes its on-site tasks, the site is to be turned back over to the state and the NRC license is to be reinstated and/or terminated following decommissioning. Until then, under the terms of the West Valley Act and a 1981 memorandum of understanding with DOE, NRC is to provide informal review and consultation and is authorized to prescribe decontamination and decommissioning criteria for the site. West Valley must also comply with the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), which requires integrated environmental planning leading to the choice of a preferable cleanup alternative, and a 1987 Stipulation of Compromise Settlement with the Coalition on West Valley Nuclear Wastes and the Radioactive Waste Campaign, which resulted from litigation concerning DOE’s on-site disposal of wastes generated by the project. The stipulation required DOE to conduct a full environmental impact study under NEPA, instead of the less detailed environmental assessment the Department had considered sufficient. Additionally, EPA and the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation have oversight responsibilities at the site. For example, under authorization from EPA, the state regulates radioactive air emissions under the Clean Air Act and the hazardous components of radioactive mixed wastes under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA). DOE has almost completed vitrifying the high-level wastes at West Valley, overcoming numerous technological challenges along the way. Vitrification has enhanced the site’s environmental, safety, and health status, and on the basis of our examination of DOE data and reports, as well as interviews with interested parties, the Department has generally operated the facility safely. However, the cleanup could take four more decades, including more than two decades of major additional cleanup work that still needs to be performed, and additional time for interim on- site storage of vitrified high-level wastes. In the near term, various wastes need to be managed and structures need to be decontaminated. In the longer term, depending on the cleanup level chosen for the site, these structures need to be torn down and either removed off-site or left in place and capped, and the site needs to be decommissioned. DOE’s operations at West Valley began in 1982 and included the construction of a vitrification facility from 1985 to 1995. From the late 1980s into the mid-1990s, waste pretreatment, sludge washing operations, and vitrification testing took place. As we reported in 1989 and 1996, construction was subject to delays and cost overruns early on. During pretreatment (1988-95), about 1.7 million gallons of low-level waste were generated and placed into almost 20,000 drums in an on-site storage area. (See fig. 3.) Pretreatment reduced the waste volume to be vitrified by over 80 percent. Vitrification operations began in 1996. They are now nearing completion, which is scheduled for September 2002. To date, the four on- site underground high-level waste tanks have been emptied of over 99 percent of their long-lived radioactivity in tank sludge, as well as 95 percent of their cesium-137 activity. To date, 255 stainless steel, cylindrical waste canisters have been filled with vitrified high-level waste. Vitrification of the remaining traces of wastes is continuing. Tank sludge, known as “tank heel,” is being removed from the tank bottoms (which have an intricate, grid-like internal support structure). In removing the liquid, high-level wastes from the underground tanks and vitrifying them, DOE has overcome numerous technological challenges. Technological successes related to West Valley vitrification have included (1) developing a separation process for pretreating the wastes (an ion exchange method, using titanium-treated zeolite for separation, which was developed at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory); (2) developing tank liquid mobilization pumps that would work in a highly radioactive environment (adapted from a Savannah River Site design); (3) implementing a glass melter technology developed by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory for use at West Valley; and (4) developing a canister waste-level monitoring system using infrared detection—a system adopted at Savannah River. The West Valley and Savannah River melter technologies have subsequently been considered for low-level waste vitrification efforts being planned at Fernald, Ohio; Savannah River; Hanford; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. West Valley’s vitrification operations are part of a multibillion-dollar DOE effort to immobilize its liquid, high-level wastes at other, larger sites— including Savannah River, Hanford, and the Idaho National Environmental and Engineering Laboratory. West Valley and Savannah River are currently vitrifying their wastes, while the efforts at Hanford and the Idaho Laboratory—whose solid-form wastes, stored in bins, will be processed differently—are not as far along. The West Valley, Savannah River, and Hanford vitrification efforts differ in technical details, including methods of pretreatment.