Summary

GAO reviewed the Department of Energy's (DOE) efforts to resume plutonium operations at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado. This fact sheet provides information on (1) the process that is being used at Rocky Flats to identify and manage environment, safety, and health issues; (2) the overall status of these issues at Rocky Flats; and (3) the status of these issues at the buildings where DOE plans to resume plutonium operations.

GAO found that: (1) since the suspension of the Rocky Flats plant in November 1989, the operating contractor has implemented a process to identify and resolve numerous ES&H issues, and to evaluate the risks posed by those issues; (2) the Rocky Flats management office has identified potentially significant ES&H issues that should be addressed before the resumption of plutonium operations; (3) Rocky Flats and the contractor had identified 2,805 ES&H issues as of May 1992, and of those, 1,573 must be resolved before plutonium operations are resumed and 1,185 are long-term issues that are resolvable subsequent to restart; (4) to determine the overall risk that ES&H issues pose to the environment and to public safety and health, the contractor created a team to calculate the risk level associated with an issue by evaluating the potential consequences and the probability of their occurrence; and (5) although DOE has resolved almost 50 percent of the resumption issues and approximately 20 percent of the long-term issues, it plans to resume operations in only 3 major plutonium buildings which account for 666 of the ES&H issues, 406 of which are resumption issues.