DOE established EM in 1989 to address the environmental legacy of 50 years of nuclear weapons production and government-sponsored nuclear energy research. The office is responsible for the cleanup of large amounts of radioactive wastes, spent nuclear fuel, excess plutonium and uranium, and contaminated soil and groundwater, as well as for the D&D of thousands of excess contaminated facilities. Excess facilities are those deemed by DOE program offices such as the Office of Science or the Office of Nuclear Energy, or the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), a separately organized agency within DOE, as not required to support respective program missions and by DOE as excess to the agency’s needs. EM may be responsible for the disposal of an entire site or of one or more facilities on a site managed by another program office or NNSA. For example, at the Mound Site in Miamisburg, Ohio, where DOE’s active mission had ceased, EM was responsible for disposing of the entire site, including the uncontaminated facilities that did not require D&D. On the other hand, at sites where DOE still has an active mission, such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory site in Los Alamos, New Mexico, managed by NNSA, EM is responsible for disposing of individual excess contaminated facilities. The D&D process encompasses the many stages of taking a facility to its final end-state (see fig. 1). As such, disposal is one of the last steps in the D&D process. Some of the initial steps in the process—operations shutdown and stabilization, for example—may be completed before EM takes responsibility for the facility. For example, NNSA may stabilize a facility while it waits for EM to accept it. The D&D process can take from several months to several years to complete. The potential end-states of facilities that require D&D include demolition, entombment, and reuse (see fig. 2). In demolition, all structures and waste are removed, and the facility is demolished. The land underneath the facility may be remediated to brownfield, in which it is suitable for limited, controlled, or industrial uses; or to greenfield, in which it is suitable for unlimited reuse. Entombment, also referred to as in-situ decommissioning, takes advantage of the facility’s structure as a containment mechanism to ensure chemicals and reactive wastes are encapsulated. For facilities that may be reused, contaminated systems are removed and structural materials are decontaminated, but the building remains and may be disposed of by transfer. EM must clean up radioactive and hazardous substances in accordance with specified standards and regulatory requirements under federal environmental laws, such as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, as amended (CERCLA) and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), as well as state Environmental Protection Agency officials, as well as officials with laws.environmental agencies in the states where EM sites are located, enforce applicable federal and state environmental laws and oversee and advise EM on its cleanup efforts. In some circumstances, tribal nations, community groups, and the public provide input into cleanup decisions. To dispose of real property—facilities and land—with reuse potential, DOE may engage the General Services Administration (GSA) or, under certain conditions, exercise its own authorities to transfer the property by sale, lease, or other mechanism to a new owner (see table 1). The Atomic Energy Act (AEA) of 1954 authorizes DOE to sell, lease, and dispose of property. The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1998 (NDAA) required DOE to promulgate regulations for a process of transferring by sale or lease defense nuclear facilities for the purpose of economic development of the property. The NDAA also authorized DOE to offer indemnification—protection against claims of injury resulting from the release or threatened release of hazardous substances—to the transferee. Other statutory provisions, referred to by DOE as “special” or “specific” legislation, also authorize the disposition of DOE’s real property at specific sites. For example, DOE was required to convey to the County of Los Alamos certain properties at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as well as transfer to the Secretary of the Interior, in trust for the Pueblo de San Ildefonso, administrative jurisdiction over certain parcels of land without compensation. The primary non-federal recipients of properties for which EM was responsible are CROs, though some local governments have also received EM property. To minimize the negative social and economic impacts of the downsizing and closure of DOE sites, DOE is required to develop a plan for restructuring the workforce at those sites in consultation with various stakeholders such as community groups in affected areas. DOE encouraged the affected communities to participate through the creation of CROs which can receive assistance from DOE for programs that mitigate the impacts of DOE’s workforce restructuring. The principal purpose of the CROs is to facilitate the reuse of former defense nuclear facilities and other unneeded property for industrial, economic, commercial, or civic purposes. Today there are eight active CROs, six of which are pursuing or are interested in pursuing real property transfers at DOE sites (see table 2). According to EM data, from 2003 through 2013 EM disposed of 1,962 facilities across 19 sites in 13 states (see fig. 3). These data includes all facilities—those that were contaminated and went through the D&D process as well as uncontaminated facilities—EM disposed of through demolition, entombment, sale or lease for reuse, or other means. Approximately 85 percent of those facilities were located at 5 sites: the Hanford Site in Washington (29 percent); the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee (20 percent); the Savannah River Site (13 percent) in South Carolina; the Idaho National Laboratory in Idaho (12 percent); and Rocky Flats in Colorado (12 percent). EM is also responsible for completing the disposition of approximately 2,900 additional facilities across 9 of the 19 sites. Approximately two-thirds of the facilities remaining are located at two sites—the Hanford Site (38 percent) and the Savannah River Site (28 percent). By the end of fiscal year 2015, EM projects that it will have completed the disposition of approximately half of the facilities for which it accepted responsibility as of 2001. According to DOE data, more than 94 percent of facilities—totaling more than 19.6 million square feet—for which EM completed D&D from 2003 through 2013 were demolished. The remaining facilities were disposed of through other mechanisms such as transfer to federal entities or sale to local governments. Disposed facilities can also show statuses that reflect other means of disposition, such as by entombment. As we will discuss later in this report, DOE and EM maintain separate databases with information on facilities for which D&D was completed. DOE’s data contain information on the disposal method that is not captured in EM data, but does not have records for a number of facilities that completed D&D over this time period. As a result, information presented in this report about disposal methods is for the 1,347 facilities DOE identified from its data as having completed decommissioning from 2003 through 2013. Nevertheless, according to EM officials, the vast majority of facilities for which D&D was completed were demolished because they were highly contaminated. EM officials as well as representatives from CROs we interviewed told us that reusing facilities that required D&D was either not possible or highly impractical due to high contamination levels and poor condition. For example, EM officials at the Oak Ridge Reservation initially identified facilities for reuse that they later determined should be demolished. In addition, according to DOE officials, most of DOE’s excess contaminated facilities are between 40 and 60 years old, have had few, if any, upgrades since their construction, and are not conducive to being remodeled for alternate uses. For example, one CRO representative said it can be challenging to justify the high costs of upgrading a facility’s infrastructure to make it usable, while another concluded that the difficulties involved in redeveloping some properties made reusing them not cost-effective. EM completed 21 property disposals through the process of transfer by sale from 2003 through 2013, at no cost and with the provision of indemnification. According to EM officials, from 2003 through 2013, 13 facilities totaling more than 331,000 square feet were transferred by sale from the Oak Ridge Reservation in Oak Ridge, Tennessee to the CRO or local government for economic development. (See appendix III for information on completed facility transfers identified by EM.) None of the facilities, which had been used for a variety of purposes including office buildings and a warehouse, was contaminated and as a result did not require D&D. For example, in addition to transferring 6 office buildings totaling approximately 200,000 square feet to the CRO for reuse as commercial office buildings, EM transferred to the City of Oak Ridge a water treatment plant, which provides potable water and sewer services to the East Tennessee Technology Park (ETTP)—an area of the Oak Ridge Reservation that DOE designated for commercial reuse and set aside for redevelopment. EM was responsible for disposing of these 13 facilities because they were located at ETTP. According to DOE officials and CRO representatives, land held by DOE, particularly uncontaminated land on or near buffer areas—large areas of land meant to protect the public from hazardous incidents—generally has more reuse potential than facilities or land located in operational areas on sites being used to support DOE missions. According to EM officials, from 2003 through 2013, DOE transferred by sale 8 land parcels totaling approximately 659 acres to non-federal entities for economic development. Again, all 8 were located at ETTP which accounts for approximately 2,200 acres of the approximately 34,000 acre Oak Ridge Reservation and sits just inside its borders. ETTP can be accessed via a public road.