
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, July 12, 1990                   TAG: 9007120416
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-14   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

JUST LIKE S&LS

SORRY, good citizens; the savings-and-loan scandal isn't the only national mess requiring a monumentally costly cleanup at your expense. The Department of Energy, under pressure from Congress, last week raised by 50 percent its estimate for what it will take to clean up radioactive and toxic wastes near nuclear-weapons production plants over the next five years.

Calling it a "rough figure," department spokesmen said $28.6 billion would be needed to begin cleanup operations through 1995. As if that weren't rough enough, the full cleanup of 122 Department of Energy nuclear sites scattered over 30 states is expected to last 30 years and cost $100 billion to $200 billion.

Wrapped for decades in a veil of national-security secrecy, many of these installations have fouled air and water with toxic wastes for years, impervious to the law. Now the bill is due, and it's a whopper.

Welcome to the post-Cold-War world; forget about the so-called peace dividend. Bringing these plants and surrounding areas into conformity with environmental laws, removing the nuclear weapons, cleaning up the polluted wetlands and waterways, re-contouring contaminated soil, and building and maintaining safe storage sites will amount to a vast undertaking consuming huge sums.

Indeed, the Energy Department's latest estimates assume the government will be able to move ahead with current plans for finding and building sites for permanent, safe disposal of nuclear wastes. So far, the search for sites hasn't gone well. Costs could rise much higher still.

Parallels with the S&L debacle are dismally obvious. In both cases, cleanup would be far cheaper had it started earlier. In both cases, warning signs years ago went ignored. In the early 1980s the Energy Department and Pentagon knew their nuclear facilities were deteriorating, yet the Reagan administration refused to acknowledge there was a problem. As with the S&Ls, only recently has the full, ugly magnitude of the mess and cost been revealed.

And so President Bush inherits the liabilities his predecessor blithely ran up. Congress will have to find the money somewhere. Taxes will have to be raised. The next generation will be further burdened. And the citizens are left to wonder why their interests have been so betrayed.

by CNB