EXECUTIVE PRODUCER: Rear Admiral Gene LaRoque, (USN, Ret.)

Director, Center for Defense Information

INTERVIEWER Sanford Gottlieb, Senior Producer

& NARRATOR: "America's Defense Monitor"

DIRECTOR OF

RESEARCH: David T. Johnson

MARKETING AND

OPERATIONS: Mark Sugg

PRODUCERS: Marguerite Arnold

Glenn Baker

Daniel Sagalyn

Stephen Sapienza

PRINCIPAL ANALYST

AND SCRIPTWRITER: Martin Calhoun

SEGMENT PRODUCER: Daniel Sagalyn

ORIGINATION: Washington, DC

PROGRAM NO.: 321, 413, 522, 550

CONDITION OF USE: Credit "America's Defense Monitor"

Center for Defense Information

(C) Copyright 1990, Center for Defense Information. All rights reserved.

Videotapes available.

The Military and the Environment features:

MR. JAMES BEARD Director, Nuclear Weapons Project,

Environmental Policy Institute

Rep. RICHARD RAY (D-GA) Chairman, House Armed Services Committee

Environmental Restoration Panel

MR. DAN REICHER National Resource Defense Council

MR. KEITH SCHNEIDER The New York Times

Rep. MIKE SYNAR (D-OK) Chairman, House Government Operations

Subcommittee on Energy, Environment,

and Natural Resources

ADMIRAL JAMES WATKINS Secretary of the Department of Energy

The Military and the Environment

NARRATOR: In March 1968, at the Dugway Proving Ground, a weapon testing range near Salt Lake City, Utah, the US Army was conducting a secret test with deadly nerve gas. Something went wrong. A gate failed to close one of the spray tanks and the plane released its poisonous payload at an abnormally high altitude. Shortly after the accident, sheepherders 27 miles downwind saw their flocks suddenly become dazed and uncoordinated. Within days, some 6000 sheep had died from nerve gas poisoning.

This tragedy is a dramatic example of the harmful impact of some military activities on the earth's environment. Because military installations are restricted properties, often in remote areas, for years this impact escaped public scrutiny. but when toxic pollutants from military installations began turning up in surrounding communities, people began to take notice. Now we are discovering the unanticipated environmental effects of maintaining a big military.

DAN REICHER: The public is finally beginning to realize that there's a price to be paid for national security, that the same facilities that are there to make the world safe for democracy are also poisoning people back home.

ADMIRAL GENE LAROCQUE: Welcome once again to "America's Defense Monitor."

I think all Americans would agree we need an adequate military force suitable for the times. And I think we would all agree that the purpose of our military is to defend the United States, to preserve our way of life. And in order to do that, the military needs to build weapons and they need to train for combat. But in the process, they must not, in my view, despoil the land that they're designed to protect, nor should they harm the lives nor health of the individuals here in the United States.

Our program today in on that subject. I hope you find it interesting.

NARRATOR: The environment. The air we breath, the water we drink, sensitive plant and animal habitats, nature's sights, sound and smells, the life support system for an entire planet. For years, through our activities, we have inflicted untold damage upon the environment. For much of this time we took for granted the earth's ability to sustain itself against the onslaught of pollution. Now, however, we can no longer ignore the increasing evidence that the violence we commit against the environment is overwhelming the earth's natural defenses.

As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union improve, for many people the fear of instant death by nuclear war is being surpassed by fears of environmental disasters. Deforestation, acid rain, global warming, and depletion of the earth's ozone layer are now recognized as real threats to the safety of the entire planet.

Across the United States, building and operating the world's most powerful military has also taken a heavy toll on the environment. The impact has been most noticeable within the Department of Energy-operated nuclear weapons complex.

Keith Schneider, a reporter for The New York Times, has written a highly acclaimed series of articles on the conditions at US nuclear weapons plants.

KEITH SCHNEIDER: The Department of Energy and its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, have left the most difficult and largest legacy of environmental destruction by any government agency.

NARRATOR: Since exploding the first atomic bomb in 1945, the United States had produced more than 60,000 nuclear warheads. In doing so, it has also created billions of gallons of highly toxic, radioactive, and chemical wastes. According to the Department of Energy, military-related activities have generated almost 99 percent of all high level radioactive wastes in the United States. Many experts now believe that the impact of these wastes on human health and the environment has to be included in any accurate accounting of the costs of the arms race.

At 17 major installations in 13 states, the Department of Energy designs, tests, and manufactures nuclear warheads. For many Americans, names such as Fernald, Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Savannah River have become synonymous with unhealthy and unsafe conditions. The National Academy of Sciences recently reported that more than 3200 separate sites at nuclear weapons facilities have been identified as having soil contamination, water contamination, or both.

The US General Accounting Office recently estimated that the eventual total cost of cleaning up these sites could reach 200 billion dollars, or more than three million dollars of cleanup costs for every nuclear warhead the United States

has produced.

Keith Schneider emphasizes the enormity of the task.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Every plant -- Every plant has very important and disturbing environmental problems. There isn't one of them that's been free of this. Again, the bill to clean up this environmental contamination is going to be $150 to $200 billion and if you listen to the Department of Energy engineers who are involved in this, they say that the government is going to be involved in cleaning this up for 150 years.

NARRATOR: President Bush selected Admiral James Watkins to head the Department of Energy, or DoE, in part because of his experience with the development of Navy nuclear weapons. Watkins was assigned responsibility for investigating the causes of the nuclear weapons facilities' toxic troubles. In August 1989, he announced his findings.

ADMIRAL JAMES WATKINS: "The DoE nuclear weapons production complex is a perfect illustration of what happens when we under-invest in the future and lose sight of the full scope of our mission. For a variety of reasons, the DoE production complex that has supplied this nation's nuclear materials and weapons is in a state of disrepair."

MR. REICHER: These facilities have operated outside of public scrutiny for literally decades. They've been exempt from federal environmental and safety requirements that we expect of private industry.

NARRATOR: Dan Reicher is a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a private environmental organization. He's an expert on the environmental impact of the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons programs.

MR. REICHER: The second problem with these facilities is that their operation has almost always put production ahead of protection of human health and the environment. The mission of the facilities has always been, first and foremost, to produce nuclear weapons and cleaning up the mess that results from that and ensuring the safety of the people that live around these plants has always been very secondary.

NARRATOR: In 1988, unsafe conditions at the savannah River plant in South Carolina and the Hanford Reservation in Washington state forced the indefinite shutdown of nuclear reactors at both plants. At the Hanford Reservation, operated by the Westinghouse Corporation, workers dumped an estimated 200 billion gallons of radioactive and chemical wastes into unlined pits and trenches. This is enough waste to cover the island of Manhattan to a height of 40 feet. By the Department of Energy's own estimates, cleaning up Hanford will cost at least $40 billion.

For years, workers at Hanford also stored highly radioactive liquid wasted in steel tanks. Now many of these tanks are leaking.

MR. REICHER: Some of those tanks have leaked large quantities of plutonium into the soil and that plutonium is moving towards groundwater. In fact, there's been calculations done which indicate that enough plutonium has leaked into the soil at Hanford to build over 40 bombs the size of the -- the Nagasaki bomb.

NARRATOR: The Department of Energy has identified leaks in over a third of the tanks at Hanford, but it claims the environmental impact had been small or nonexistent. In addition, it has admitted that for years radioactive iodine was released into the atmosphere at Hanford. Recently the Department of Energy acknowledged what many residents of communities surrounding the nuclear weapons plant had long suspected: that radioactive emissions may be responsible for illnesses, including cancer, in local residents.

The Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, near Idaho Falls, is a nuclear reactor testing ground and uranium processing plant also operated by the Westinghouse Corporation. Among its primary functions is the recycling of spent fuel from Navy ships and submarine reactors.

MR. SCHNEIDER: That plant itself injected 16 billion gallons of contaminated water directly into the Snake River aquifer for 34 years, from 1953 to 19 -- excuse me, 32 years, 1952 to 1984. That -- those 16 billion gallons of water were contaminated with 70,000 curies of cesium and strontium and tritium, very high-level liquid radioactive waste, plus toxic contaminants. the Snake River aquifer is the principal drinking water source and irrigation source for all of southern Idaho, 200,000 people, and most of Idaho's $400 million potato crop. The people in Idaho are very upset about that.

NARRATOR: The Feed Materials Production Center is a uranium processing plant in Fernald, Ohio, operated by Westinghouse. For years, plant operators secretly released hundreds of thousands of pounds of uranium dust into the air. Millions of pounds were also released into sources of water. IN 1989, the Department of energy agreed to pay $78 million to residents of Fernald as compensation for emotional distress and loss of property values.

According to Keith Schneider, the cost to some individuals may have been much greater.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Ken Noble, a reporter who did our work -- our best work on Fernald, found residents up there, one family in particular, who had a son who had an amputated leg because of cancer in his leg. When they --when they went -- when they had the bone analyzed by technicians and scientists, they found 10 times as much uranium in the bone, as a constituent of the bone, than there would be normally.

The family also has another son who has been sick and has a -- has a --some sort of chronic disease. I -- I don't know if it's cancer, maybe it's a blood disease that was -- that they believe is related to the contamination. And they're just one of many, many families up there that link chronic illnesses with the contamination.

NARRATOR: The Department of Energy, however, denies that activities at the Fernald plant are responsible for any illnesses or diseases.

Dan Reicher explains that it is difficult to link health problems with nuclear weapons plants without more information than is presently available.

MR. REICHER: There is not clear linkages at each and every facility between the wastes that have been disposed and human health, in part because of lack of information, in part because those sorts of links are difficult to prove. Often they take decades to establish themselves, if we're talking about cancers. So, the impacts are not clearcut.

One of the problems has been there has been a lack of access to the data that the Department of Energy has been collecting about releases and about exposures until recently, when the Department of Energy, after much pressure, agreed to give up some of that data.

NARRATOR: The Savannah River plant in South Carolina is the nation's only source of tritium, a gas used to increase the explosive power of nuclear bombs. At one time in the past, when the plant was operated by the Dupont Company, workers at the facility disposed of low-level radioactive wasted by burying it in cardboard boxes.

There is evidence that radioactive waste at Savannah River has seeped into the Tuscaloosa aquifer beneath the facility. This aquifer is a major source of drinking water for much of the southeastern United States.

MR. SCHNEIDER: What they have left is this highly radio-active toxic chemical soup, which is literally so thermally hot, it boils. SO, they have disposed of this by putting it into tanks, which are cooled with coils of water -- coils in which water runs through it. There are 38 million gallons of this high-level, thermally hot, toxic radioactive soup sitting in Savannah River.

NARRATOR: For years ,scientists and engineers have been searching for permanent and safe ways to dispose of radioactive wastes, which remain deadly for thousands of years. One proposal that has been made to solve this problem is to mix liquid radioactive waste with molten glass, a process called glassification. The glass cools and hardens inside steel canisters, which would then be buried deep in the earth. A glassification plant is currently under construction at the Savannah River plant.

MR. REICHER: The idea of glassifying waste is a good one, glassifying these high - level wastes. And what it will mean is that we put them into a form that will resist long term degradation and those waste forms can then be disposed of in a -- in a geologic setting that will resist the -- the sort of forces that will would allow this contamination to spread if we left it in its current place.

NARRATOR: The Department of Energy also hopes to store nuclear wastes at sites in Nevada and New Mexico. The DoE, however, has yet to demonstrate that these sites are environmentally safe.

MR. REICHER: It raises the very serious question about whether we should, in fact, be producing the sort of large quantities of waste that we are producing at these facilities if we have no adequate, permanent places to -- to dispose of them.

NARRATOR: The Soviet Union, facing its own military -related environmental problems, recently proposed that both the United States and the Soviets end their production of plutonium and uranium for nuclear weapons. President Bush has rejected the proposal and plans to spend as much as $50 billion to build a new generation of nuclear facilities. Others, however, support a ban on the production of nuclear weapons materials, not only on environmental grounds, but also as an important step toward ending the nuclear arms race.

MR. SCHNEIDER: Out of this disrepair has come an opportunity, according to many people involved in the arms control community. The Bush administration and the previous Reagan administration didn't want to listen to this. The Soviet Union is listening to this because they have as much disrepair, possibly more, than we have.

NARRATOR: In August 1989, Secretary Watkins presented a costly plan to clean up, repair and rebuild the nuclear weapons complex over a period of 30 years.

DoE SECREATARY WATKINS: "Before we launched this plan, there were estimates that the clean-up and compliance for DoE facilities could run as high as $150 billion over 50 years. I believe that is too much money and too much time. Now don't misunderstand what I said. The cost will be high and over 30 years that this plan covers, we'll pass much of the burden on to the next generation."

MR. REICHER: The Department of Energy has taken some small steps towards cleaning up the waste disposal problems and fixing the safety problems at these facilities. They've begun, at a few facilities, to actually attempt to stabilize the waste where they've been dumped, in order to prevent further contamination. They've begun to build facilities that can process new wastes, in order to render them less toxic. There have been upgrades to safety systems that have taken place at some of the facilities. But the -- But the problems are so massive and so complex that DoE has barely made a dent.

NARRATOR: Secretary Watkins has also declared that the Energy Department will undergo "a fundamental change of priorities."

DoE SECRETARY WATKINS: "But I'm also convinced that the expected organizational changes and a revised research and development program will place the Department of Energy in a stronger position to meet its obligation to protect the public health and environment while achieving its national security mission and in a cost effective way."

NARRATOR: Some people, however, remain skeptical about the department's ability to carry out both its environmental and military goals.

James Beard is director of the Nuclear Weapons Project at the private Environmental Policy Institute. He is among the most informed observers of DoE's nuclear weapons facilities.

JAMES BEARD: Secretary Watkins and -- and really anybody who heads the Department of Energy embodies an incredible conflict of interest. On the one hand, they're responsible for producing nuclear weapons; on the other hand, they're responsible for protecting the environment. As long as one person has to make that -- to balance those decisions, I don't think that the environment's going to get a fair shake.

MR. SCHNEIDER: The culture of the agency is not environmentally -- you know, there' no focus on the environment internally, in their heart. They do it because -- they're doing it grudgingly. They're doing it because public opinion is pushing them to do it. But if you really talk to them, they're not environmentalists, nor are they concerned. They are concerned with one mission -- to produce nuclear weapons.

NARRATOR: Unfortunately, military-related environmental problems do not end with the Department of Energy. At hundreds of installations operated by the Department of Defense, through ignorance and negligence, deadly toxic chemicals have been haphazardly dumped into the ground.

REP. RICHARD RAY (D-GA): We now have identified on about 800 military bases over 8000 sites that have some contamination. We have also found that on a number of closed military installations, which we no longer own, there are some 7000 sites on those particular closed inactive military installations, some of them being used by the public sector now.

NARRATOR: Congressman Richard Ray of Georgia is chairman of the Environmental Restoration Panel of the House Armed Services Committee. This important panel was established in 1985 to monitor the military's actions to clean up the environment. Cong. Ray, who served for 10 years as an assistant to Senator Sam Nunn, is known as a conscientious member of the Armed Services Committee.

REP. RAY: Well, we have toxic waste sites on military bases that go back 50 years and maybe even more. Twenty-five, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, in all of past history up until the last 10 to 15 years, we didn't have guidelines and technological knowhow of what to do with toxic waste. We didn't even know how toxic some of the waste was.

NARRATOR: In 1989, the Pentagon estimated that it will cost between $9 and $14 billion to clean up installations. That's in addition to the clean-up at the Department of Energy facilities.

But according to Congressman Mike Synar of Oklahoma, it may still be too early to predict the total amount of time and taxpayers' money that will be required. Synar is the vigorous chairman of a House Government Operations subcommittee that monitors environmental issues.

REP. MIKE SYNAR (D, OK): The fact of the matter is that a lot of the sampling and testing that's going to be necessary to determine the extent of the problem has not been done. And very frankly, the actions to clean up the sites have not started with any kind of reliance so that we think that we can do it in a timely fashion.

NARRATOR: At a dozen Army installations where the United States has produced and stored chemical weapons, serious pollution problems exist. Among these facilities are the Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas and the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Colorado. Experts once described the center of the Rocky Mountain Arsenal as the most polluted square mile on earth. At the Pine Bluff Arsenal, the United States resumed manufacturing chemicals for nerve gas weapons in 1987.

By the Pentagon's own estimates, the military services create more than 400,000 tons of hazardous chemical wastes annually. Much of this waste comes from routine activities such as cleaning engines, stripping paint, and fueling and servicing aircraft and other equipment.

For years, Congressman Mike Synar has been prodding the Pentagon to clean up its installations. In 1984, he asked the General Accounting Office to review hazardous waste problems at Oklahoma's Tinker Air Force Base.

REP. SYNAR: One of the chemical agents that we've been finding to a large degree on a lot of the military bases is an agent called TCE. It comes form the wastes that are generated on a military base, some of the fuels, some of the waste products, cleansers and other things that are used, and this TCE product has been shown to cause cancer in laboratory animals. Now regrettably some of that has seeped into our ground water tables at various military bases and it jeopardizes the health and safety of the people who work at the military base, as well as the people in the surrounding communities.

NARRATOR: TCE is the only one of 70 different types of hazardous wastes uncovered at Tinker Air Force Base. Service and maintenance operations at the air base can generate as much as one million gallons of waste water every day.

McClellan Air Force Base in California also has serious problems with hazardous waste. In 1985, the Air Force was required to provide bottled water to residents of the town of Rancho Cordoba because the air base had contaminated the ground water with TCE. Contamination has been discovered more than a mile from McClellan. Until legal action was threatened, however, the Air Force had refused to give California authorities a report indicating that contamination had moved off the base.

In the past, the military has not been held accountable to the same environmental standards demanded of the private sector. The Justice Department has argued that military facilities are entitled to "sovereign immunity" from environmental enforcement actions taken by state authorities and federal regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

REP. SYNAR: I think there are two things that need to be done with respect to making sure that federal facilities meet the same standards that the private sector meets. First of all, is an attitude at the Department of Defense that they will have as their mission not only the national security mission, but the environmental mission. Secondly, we have to have tough enforcement by the Justice Department, the Department of Defense, EPA, and others who are in charge of enforcement.

NARRATOR: The Pentagon has ordered the military services to cut in half the amount of hazardous wastes they produce by the end of 1992. A procedure called plastic media blasting is one example of how the services are working to meet this goal. The medium in this case consists of plastic pellets blasted from an air hose instead of solvents to strip paint. The pellets can then be recovered from the ground and reused.

REP. RAY: There are many procedures which are being used right now that are an improvement over -- over the past.

NARRATOR: As we look to the future, can we assure that our nation's military requirements will never again sweep aside environmental concerns? On the other hand, can we adequately protect the environment without diminishing our military strength?

REP. RAY: It's important to keep a balanced approach here. and the balance approach, of course, is to have a strong defense, have deterrent, and maybe a reduced, affordable, common sense defense, but still a strong deterrent.

MR. BEARD: At some point, all this is going to catch up with us and it's not going to matter how many weapons we have. It's going to be a question of whether we can drink our water or breathe our air.

ADM. LAROCQUE: Well, it's pretty obvious we have a mess on our hands, but it is also obvious that the United States military is doing a lot to try to clean up that mess. The question is are they doing enough. And I'd say that the answer is no, they're not devoting enough resources to clean up the mess they they've created.

On the other hand, they're also continuing to build more and more nuclear weapons and chemical weapons, which we all know have created this environmental mess. The Cold War is over. The threat from the Soviet Union has diminished. It is time now to reorient our resources and stop building these weapons which create problems and clean up the mess we have created.

I hope you found the program interesting. Please drop us a note here the Center for Defense Information and give us your comments. Until next time, I'm Gene LaRocque for "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

CONDITION OF USE: Credit "AMERICA'S DEFENSE MONITOR."

Center for Defense Information