The facts
The Government Accountability Office published a report on October 16, 2026, on how the Department of Energy cleans up its old nuclear weapons sites. DOE's Office of Environmental Management handles 15 remaining sites contaminated by decades of nuclear weapons production and nuclear energy research. DOE estimates the cleanup will cost between $641 billion and $840 billion and will not be finished until the year 2100. It has already spent about $241 billion since the program began in 1989 and finished 92 of the 107 sites it was responsible for. At the Hanford site in Washington, 586 square miles of former weapons-production land, DOE and regulators set cleanup levels for nearly a third of the site based on assumed future residential use, even though the initial plan called for conservation, preservation, or industrial use. In the 100 Area, 154 square miles along the Columbia River where several nuclear reactors were built, cleanup was done to residential standards, which required removing soil and debris 15 feet below the surface, even though the planned use was conservation and preservation. In the 300 Area near Richland, 39.5 square miles planned for industrial use were cleaned to residential standards because EPA considered residential use 'reasonably foreseeable,' while DOE's own position is that the land will be industrial. In Idaho, none of the 890-square-mile site was planned for residential use in DOE's 1996 land use plan, but the majority of its cleanup levels assume future residential use. For future soil cleanups there, DOE agreed to dig up to 10 feet deep in hypothetical residential areas versus 4 feet for industrial ones. DOE officials told GAO that realistically, residential use on any part of the site is unlikely, even after 2095, the year DOE is supposed
Our take
Somewhere in Idaho there is a patch of radioactive dirt, sitting next to underground waste tanks, that the federal government has scrubbed clean enough for a goddamn toddler to build sandcastles on, even though the government's own officials admit nobody will ever build a house there, not even after 2095, when the radiation has had another 70 years to calm down. This is the Energy Department's idea of planning: decontaminate first, ask who the shit it's for later. The numbers are so big they stop being numbers. Up to $840 billion. Done in 2100. That is not a cleanup budget, it is a hereditary monarchy: your great-grandchildren will still be paying men in hazmat suits to dig up dirt that nobody will ever stand on, because in 2009 some regulator decided a family might one day want to raise kids next to a plutonium tank farm. The 100 Area got 15 feet of soil scraped off the top. Fifteen feet. They are not cleaning a site, they are performing an exorcism with a bulldozer. And then comes the punchline, the one line that tells you everything about how Washington works. GAO asked the obvious question: how much extra did the imaginary-suburb standard cost? The answer: figuring that out would impose 'an unnecessary burden' on the agency. Let that sink in. An agency spending three-quarters of a trillion dollars of your money says that doing basic arithmetic about its own spending is too much of a burden. The burden, apparently, is on you for asking. These are the either the same people who will tell you with a straight face that there is no money for anything you actually want. There is always money for digging up clean dirt next to a nuclear waste tank and calling it a neighborhood. There is just no money for the spreadsheet that would tell you what it cost. Counting the waste is the only waste they refuse to fund.
