For nearly 40 years, the Rocky Flats plant, located about 16 miles northwest of downtown Denver, served as a nuclear weapons production facility. Afterward, the site bore the scars of that role: soil, groundwater, surface water, and many of the buildings at the site were contaminated with radioactive materials, such as plutonium and uranium; toxic metals, such as beryllium; and hazardous chemicals, such as cleaning solvents and degreasers. Accordingly, the site became one of DOE’s priorities for environmental cleanup. While most of the approximately 6,300 acres that make up the Rocky Flats site served through the years as an undeveloped buffer zone, about one-half of a square mile (385 acres) in the center of the site constituted the industrial area, where for decades, plutonium was shaped into plutonium triggers or “pits” for use in nuclear weapons. About one-fourth of the site’s more than 800 original structures (e.g., buildings and storage tanks) were radiologically or chemically contaminated—some severely so—by site operations over the years. The site was cleaned up under the terms of a contract between DOE and Kaiser-Hill. The first contract took effect July 1, 1995. In late 1999, DOE and Kaiser-Hill negotiated a new contract, which took effect on February 1, 2000. The cleanup work was done predominantly by subcontractors, under the contractor’s management. The 2000 contract specified both the contractor’s and DOE’s responsibilities. The contractor was responsible for processing, packaging, and shipping off site all of Rocky Flats’ nuclear materials and radioactive and hazardous wastes; cleaning up and demolishing more than 700 structures that remained on site in February 2000; and cleaning up the site’s contaminated soil and groundwater. DOE was required to provide a variety of services and items to support the project. Essentially, the contract required DOE to arrange receiver sites for all the materials and wastes and obtain the necessary certifications for the containers in which the materials and wastes had to be packed and shipped. Many DOE sites played a significant role in Rocky Flats’ cleanup and closure, especially those sites that received materials or wastes from Rocky Flats, such as the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, the Nevada Test Site, and the Hanford Site in Washington. Much of the cleanup work at Rocky Flats was labor intensive and tedious. Plutonium is dangerous to human health, even in minute quantities, especially if inhaled or ingested. Accordingly, workers handling plutonium- contaminated materials and equipment had to wear cumbersome protective suits with enclosed respiratory systems, and sometimes had to wield heavy and ungainly tools. Also, the equipment being worked on had to be enclosed within plastic or glass to prevent airborne contaminants from reaching unprotected workers or surfaces. Figure 1 shows workers in protective clothing cutting contaminated materials to fit shipping containers. Four key factors contributed to the early completion of the physical cleanup of Rocky Flats: (1) DOE and the contractor overcame several major challenges identified in GAO’s 2001 report on the Rocky Flats cleanup, (2) DOE and the site’s regulatory agencies agreed to use an accelerated process to clean up the site, (3) a number of site-specific characteristics combined to limit the scope and complexity of the cleanup effort, and (4) DOE offered the contractor $560 million in total incentive fees to finish the cleanup ahead of schedule and under cost. The first key factor that contributed to the early completion of the physical cleanup of Rocky Flats was that DOE and the contractor resolved four of the five major challenges we identified in our 2001 report. These challenges included (1) completing the decontamination and demolition of the site’s structures; (2) overcoming limitations on the available number of transportation casks and on the loading capability for transuranic waste; (3) identifying the overall scope of the cleanup project—specifically, the extent of contamination, the eventual use of the site, and the level of cleanup that eventual use would require; (4) getting the automated plutonium-packaging system to reliably perform at the rate needed for timely completion; and (5) preventing safety problems, which can result in work shutdowns and delay cleanup work. One major challenge DOE and the contractor overcame was completing the decontamination and demolition of hundreds of structures at the site. At the end of fiscal year 2000, the contractor had completed only about 10 percent of the predemolition work, which included activities such as removing plutonium and other nuclear materials from furnaces, pipes, and other locations within buildings; draining and removing plutonium- or uranium-laden liquids or residues from process pipes and tanks; dismantling plutonium-processing furnaces; stripping out contaminated process pipelines; and cutting up and removing hundreds of contaminated gloveboxes. Further, at the time of our 2001 report, the contractor had demolished only 81 of the 802 structures that existed at the site when cleanup began. That accomplishment equated to about 10 percent of the total number of structures and only about 5 percent of the total square footage. Remaining to be demolished at the end of fiscal year 2000 were 721 structures, encompassing about 3.4 million square feet. DOE and the contractor overcame challenges to decontamination and demolition primarily through innovation, as workers continuously sought innovative cleanup technologies that would accomplish tasks more safely, quickly, and cheaply. For example, the contractor found that it could chemically decontaminate large pieces of equipment, such as tanks and gloveboxes, by wiping their surfaces with a liquid cerium nitrate solution. By doing so, the contractor could reduce the contamination enough that the contaminated object could be shipped as low-level radioactive waste rather than transuranic waste, which requires a more costly shipping and disposal process. The Rocky Flats buildings contained approximately 1,475 gloveboxes, ranging from shoe box size to the size of an entire room. By reducing the level of contamination, the contractor could ship even large gloveboxes whole, rather than having to cut them into pieces small enough to fit into standard waste boxes used for shipping transuranic waste. Figure 2 shows workers using cerium nitrate to decontaminate a glovebox and loading a dismantled, decontaminated glovebox into a container for shipping. The use of explosives in building demolition was another important time- saving demolition technique. Contractor officials said they had learned lessons from another DOE site at which DOE had doubted the demolitions experts and reduced the amount of explosives used, resulting in an explosion that failed to bring the structure down. At Rocky Flats, accordingly, the contractor and DOE brought in demolitions experts and, while closely reviewing the demolition plans and overseeing the work, let the experts’ opinions prevail. As a result, the use of explosives saved time and money for the contractor and DOE. For example, in bringing down building 881, one of the four original manufacturing facilities at Rocky Flats, a contractor official estimated that the use of explosives saved about 4 months, and reduced risks to workers by removing hazards associated with heavy equipment and the falling debris that typically results from their use in lieu of explosives. After being completely decontaminated, building 881 was wired with explosives and, as shown in figure 3, collapsed into its basement. In addition to building 881, the contractor used explosives to bring down smaller facilities, such as the guard and water towers, and to separate the concrete from the rebar (the steel reinforcing bar) on the walls of building 886. Additional information on decontamination and demolition activities at Rocky Flats is contained in appendix III. A second challenge DOE and the contractor overcame was limitations on the available number of transportation casks and on the loading capability for transuranic waste. At the time of our 2001 report, the contractor’s ability to ship the total volume of waste off site to DOE’s WIPP facility by the target closure date was in doubt because of uncertainties about whether DOE could obtain and provide the number of transportation casks necessary to meet the contractor’s projected shipping schedule, especially for fiscal years 2002 and 2003, and because of uncertainties about whether the three loading facilities (two of which were still under construction at the time of our 2000 review) would be able to meet the shipping schedule for the site’s peak shipping years. That shipping schedule had been compressed by various events, including delays in the opening of WIPP. DOE and the contractor overcame this challenge primarily through cooperation and perseverance. Whenever a DOE site could not use a shipping container as scheduled, WIPP would send the container to Rocky Flats instead. Also, DOE headquarters maintained a high priority on Rocky Flats throughout the cleanup and made sure that it received the government-furnished services and items it needed. Figure 4 shows special transportation casks used to transport transuranic waste. Also, while buildings at Rocky Flats were being demolished, the contractor built the two additional loading facilities, as previously mentioned, to ensure that loading and shipping schedules could be supported. The new facilities resolved the challenge of inadequate loading capability and allowed the contractor to increase its transuranic waste-shipping capability to 15 shipments a week. A third major challenge DOE and the contractor overcame was identifying the overall scope of the cleanup—specifically, the extent of contamination, the eventual use of the site, and the level of cleanup that eventual use would require. At the time of our 2001 report, the postcleanup use of the site—and, therefore, the level of cleanup required—was uncertain. Moreover, the extent of soil contamination on the site and the depth and degree of contamination under many of the former production buildings was not fully understood, particularly in the former industrial area, because parts of the site had not been fully sampled.