Integrating Environmental Restoration and Ecological Restoration: Long-Term Stewardship at the Department of Energy

With the ending of the Cold War, several federal agencies are reclaiming land through remediation and restoration and are considering potential future land uses that are compatible with current uses and local needs. Some sites are sufficiently contaminated that it is likely that the responsible federal agency will retain control over the land for the foreseeable future, providing them with a stewardship mission. This is particularly true of some of the larger Department of Energy (DOE) facilities contaminated during the production of nuclear weapons. The use of the term “restoration” is explored in this paper because the word means different things to the public, ecologists, and environmental managers responsible for contaminated sites, such as Superfund sites and the DOE facilities. While environmental restoration usually refers to remediation and removal of hazardous wastes, ecological restoration refers to the broader process of repairing damaged ecosystems and enhancing their productivity and/or biodiversity. The goals of the two types of restoration can be melded by considering environmental restoration as a special case of ecological restoration, one that involves risk reduction from hazardous wastes, and by broadening environmental restoration to include a more extensive problem-formulation phase (both temporal and spatial), which includes the goal of reestablishing a functioning ecosystem after remediation. Further, evaluating options for the desired post remediation result will inform managers and policy-makers concerning the feasibility and efficacy of environmental restoration itself.     

Shifting Priorities at the Department of Energy's Bomb Factories: Protecting Human and Ecological Health

More than 50 years of research, development, manufacture, and testing of nuclear weapons at Department of Energy (DOE) sites has left a legacy of on-site contamination that often spreads to surrounding areas. Despite substantial cleanup budgets in the last decade, the DOE's top-to-bottom review team concluded that relatively little actual cleanup has been accomplished, although milestones have been met and work packages completed. Rather than solely use regulatory constraints to direct cleanup, many people have suggested that human and ecological health should guide long-term stewardship goals of DOE-managed sites. The main questions are how ecological and human health considerations should be applied in deciding the extent of cleanup that contaminated sites should receive and how near-term and longer run considerations of costs and benefits should be balanced as cleanup decisions are made. One effort to protect ecological integrity is the designation of the largest sites as National Environmental Research Parks (NERPs). Recently, the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) suggested isolating and conserving DOE sites as a policy priority because of their rich ecological diversity. A more effective long-term stewardship approach for former nuclear weapons complex sites may emerge if the guiding principles are to (1) reduce risks to human and ecological health, (2) protect cultural traditions, and (3) lower short- and long-term cleanup and remediation costs. A “net benefits” perspective that takes both near- and longer-term costs and consequences into account can help illuminate the trade-offs between expensive cleanup in the near term and the need to assure long-term protection of human health, cultural values, and high levels of biodiversity and ecological integrity that currently exist at many DOE sites.     

Integrating long-term stewardship goals into the remediation process: natural resource damages and the Department of Energy

The United States and other developed countries are faced with restoring and managing degraded ecosystems. Evaluations of the degradation of ecological resources can be used for determining ecological risk, making remediation or restoration decisions, aiding stakeholders with future land use decisions, and assessing natural resource damages. Department of Energy (DOE) lands provide a useful case study for examining degradation of ecological resources in light of past or present land uses and natural resource damage assessment (NRDA). We suggest that past site history should be incorporated into the cleanup and restoration phase to reduce the ultimate NRDA costs, and hasten resource recovery. The lands that DOE purchased over 50 years ago ranged from relatively undisturbed to heavily impacted farmland, and the impact that occurred from DOE occupation varies from regeneration of natural ecosystems (benefits) to increased exposure to several stressors (negative effects). During the time of the DOE releases, other changes occurred on the lands, including recovery from the disturbance effects of farming, grazing, and residential occupation, and the cessation of human disturbance. Thus, the injury to natural resources that occurred as a result of chemical and radiological releases occurred on top of recovery of already degraded systems. Both spatial (size and dispersion of patch types) and temporal (past/present/future land use and ecological condition) components are critical aspects of resource evaluation, restoration, and NRDA. For many DOE sites, integrating natural resource restoration with remediation to reduce or eliminate the need for NRDA could be a win-win situation for both responsible parties and natural resource trustees by eliminating costly NRDAs by both sides, and by restoring natural resources to a level that satisfies the trustees, while being cost-effective for the responsible parties. It requires integration of remediation, restoration, and end-state planning to a greater degree than is currently done at most DOE sites.