U.S. Waste Cleanup Bill Put at $750 Billion : Environment: The total could reach as much as $1.7 trillion if it becomes necessary to destroy the dangerous substances, investigators say.

WASHINGTON — The total public and private bill for cleaning up the thousands of hazardous waste sites across the United States is likely to be about $750 billion over the next 30 years, a University of Tennessee research team estimated Monday.

Reporting on a three-year study characterized as the first attempt to calculate the cost of federal, state and private cleanup programs, the investigators said that the tab could range from $500 billion to a staggering $1.7 trillion.

The lower figure, they said, would result from a strategy focused on containment of hazardous materials, while the higher one would stem from a national effort to destroy the dangerous substances accumulated over decades.

Leaders of the study acknowledged that their efforts to put a price tag on the cleanup were sometimes frustrated by a lack of clarity about policy and strategy and a lack of data, particularly in the case the Energy Department’s weapons sites.

In 1988, the Energy Department projected the cost of its environmental protection program at as much as $111 billion, but other estimates have doubled that.

Milton Russell, a former official of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers who was in charge of the study, said that the cost of cleaning up the weapons sites “will be much larger” than the Energy Department has estimated.

Russell and others involved in the study by the university’s Waste Management Research and Education Institute briefed reporters in Washington shortly before presenting their findings to the Society for Risk Analysis in Baltimore.

In the course of its research, the 35-member Tennessee team carried out case studies of 10 sites that qualified for cleanup under the nation’s Superfund law.

While declining to put an upper limit on the cost of restoring the weapons sites, the scientists said that the cost of cleaning up Superfund sites would range from $106 billion to $302 billion. The bill for eliminating other hazardous dumps under the jurisdiction of the federal Resources Conservation and Recovery Act was estimated at $170 billion to $377 billion.

Since the 1980 creation of the Superfund to clean up sites on a national priority list of hazardous dumps, Congress has appropriated $10 billion for the effort. The EPA has authorized expenditures of $7.5 billion for the controversial program, and actually spent $4.8 billion.

The investigators concluded that cleanup costs have weighed more heavily in decision-making at the EPA than at the Department of Energy.