ABSTRACT
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) involvement at United States Departments of Energy and Defense is limited, though all cleanup is to be performed by the responsible federal agency subject to cooperative agreements with EPA. The discrepancy is a result of the well-intentioned political forces which drove the enactment of Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) and an incomplete scientific understanding of natural attenuation in 1980 and 1986 when CERCLA was before Congress. There is no mention in CERCLA of natural attenuation, but there is in the current National Contingency Plan (NCP) which expands upon the statutory criteria and provides more guidance on the remedy selection method. EPA's methodology for choosing a cleanup strategy makes sense only if viewed as the regulatory reflection of an overly optimistic statutory cleanup regime. The law was drafted assuming sites had to be cleaned up in order to protect public health and that sites could be cleaned up.
