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AREA RELATIONS, P.O. Box 808, L-790, Livermore, CA 94551 March 1993 his letter updates you on the progress of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) efforts to address ground water and soil contamination at its LLNL Livermore site. In the past you received the Ground Water Update; we're experimenting with a different format to get information to you faster. DOE and LLNL have come to a new stage in the technical work. We are designing and implementing the chosen cleanup methods. Our future communication activities will be particularly challenging because a cleanup of this size is a dynamic process, and is being carried out in a highly political arena: DOE and LLNL have little control over one of the major community concerns — cleanup funding levels. We expect that this will be an issue until cleanup is complete. It is particularly sensitive now as a new Administration and Congress look at ways to cut spending and reduce the deficit. The cleanup approach will continue to be refined and optimized as actual field observations show us how accurate our estimates have been. There are technical uncertainties regarding Iarge-scale ground water and soil cleanups like ours. For this Mason, initial conclusions regarding cleanup progress are expected to change overtime. (But they haven't changed yet! See "Greatly Exaggerated" below.) Finally, we anticipate that information on the progress of the LLNL cleanup will continue to be used in the anti-nuclear weapons debate, despite the cleanup having largely to do with a relatively small amount of gasoline and chemicals used in solvents and degreasers and a small amount of radioactivity. These currently pose no threat to public health and safety and little calculated future risk even if no cleanup were to be performed. We at LLNL are committed to protecting the environment and working with the community in our ground water and soil cleanup. We have given much effort to this activity and are now poised to implement cleanup plans that have been almost ten years in the making. a Greatly Exaggerated Mark Twain once said, "reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." So are reports of the Lab's ground water cleanup taking longer than originally estimated. There has been no change in how long the cleanup will take. It is still estimated at 53 years. What has occurred is that one of several studies was brought to the attention of the media. In a recent study performed for LLNL, a U.C. Berkeley graduate student suggested that abiotic degradation of the contamination is not happening. If true, this could cause a longer cleanup if abiotic degradation was the ONLY factor influencing the cleanup time. Many studies and analyses are currently being conducted as part of the cleanup project at LLNL. These have been discussed with the Community Work Group (CWG) and in the documents filed with the regulatory agencies. Some will undoubtedly suggest that some assumptions on the length of the cleanup are wrong. And some will be right. Others will show how to do the cleanup faster than estimated. Any significant change in the cleanup method and time will be shared with the public when the studies produce a clear picture. Until then, the original estimate of 53 years remains the best standard. a