Superfund
Superfund is a mature program, and technologies for cleanup are advancing; however, the capacity of the program to take on very large and complex sites, including contaminated sediment sites and area-wide impacts from legacy mining sites, is not sufficient to address the scope of the problem. While the impact of cleanup activities is clearly significant, increased enforcement, liability provisions, and technical requirements have led to a significant reduction in the careless disposal of hazardous materials.
The National Priorities List (NPL), maintained by EPA, contains the list of sites covered by Superfund’s remedial program. The NPL is routinely updated as sites are cleaned and removed from the list, and other sites are discovered, evaluated, and added. As of April 2020, there were 1,178 non-Federal Superfund sites, 157 Federal Sites (i.e., Superfund sites where another federal department or agency is responsible for the cleanup), and 51 sites proposed for the NPL. There are 424 former Superfund sites, sites that have been cleaned up and deleted from the NPL.
Additionally, it is estimated that there are as many as 500,000 abandoned mines in our nation. Abandoned mine lands (AMLs) pose health risks like radiation exposure, poisoned fish, and contaminated soil, water, and air. Surface runoff carries AML-originated silt and debris down-stream, which is often contaminated by metals and acid. Acid mine drainage (AMD) from abandoned mines poses significant risks to surface water and groundwater. Abandoned uranium mines pose the added threat of radiation exposure to the list of health concerns.
The Superfund program has been essentially “steady state”— the rate of deletions from the NPL plus remedial construction completions has been very close to the rate at which new sites have been added to the NPL. In 2017, EPA revised the Hazard Ranking System (HRS), the evaluation system used to determine if sites should be considered for inclusion on the NPL based on the threat to human health and the environment. In that revision, EPA added the potential for exposure to hazardous substances via vapor intrusion, where vapor-forming chemicals migrate from the subsurface into overlying buildings.
There has been a yearly increase in the number of sites ready to be cleaned up; however, funding is lacking. In essence, these are “shovel-ready” cleanup projects to protect human health and the environment that are not moving forward because of insufficient funding. These unfunded projects tend to stay unfunded; of the 34 unfunded remedial construction projects in FY 2019, 16 had been unfunded for two or more years, and six had been unfunded for four or more years. This has led to the growth of the backlog of deferred projects. That growth in backlog has occurred despite a decrease in the number of NPL additions over the last several years. For example, only seven sites were added in FY 2019.
When funding is available, Superfund cleanups are successful in converting contaminated sites into commercially viable properties for the economic benefit of communities. In 2017, EPA established a Superfund Task Force and has undertaken a sustained effort to examine the Superfund program and develop recommendations to expedite the remediation of sites and return them to communities. At the end of FY 2018, 529 current and former Superfund sites were in reuse or continued use, supporting 8,690 businesses that provided 195,465 jobs, resulting in $13.3 billion in estimated annual employment income and $52.4 billion in annual sales — many times EPA’s expenditures at these sites. Fifty-nine of those sites are home to renewable energy projects, with an installed capacity of 360 megawatts.
