The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers anticipates completing decommissioning of the reactor on the radioactively contaminated STURGIS barge by June, after which what remains of the former floating nuclear power plant will be transported for shipbreaking.
“We’re getting really close. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we can tell it’s not a train coming at us,” Army Corps health physicist and program manager Hans Honerlah said during a March panel discussion at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix, Ariz.
The STURGIS, a former World War II Liberty Ship that provided nuclear power for U.S. military and civilian purposes in the Panama Canal in the 1960s to 1970s, arrived at the Port of Galveston, Texas, in 2015 after decades at the James River Reserve Fleet in Virginia. APTIM Federal Services, previously CB&I Federal Services LLC, is the contractor for decommissioning, dismantlement, and disposal of the MH-1A reactor.
Since decommissioning began, 99 percent of the radioactivity has been removed from the barge and shipped for disposal at the Waste Control Specialists facility in Andrews County, Texas. That encompasses the nuclear reactor vessel, spent fuel storage tank, canopy, and other large components. In all, nearly 1.4 million pounds of waste has been sent to Waste Control Specialists, along with 1 million pounds of wastewater shipped to a US Ecology facility in Texas, Honerlah said.
The decommissioning contract has increased from $34.6 million to just over $66.5 million, due to two contract modifications that resulted from the project’s “complexity and challenges,” Brenda Barber, project manager at the Army Corps’ Environmental and Munitions Design Center in Baltimore, said during the panel. The completion date for decommissioning and shipbreaking, originally scheduled for fiscal 2016, has also been delayed by about three years.
Barber and Honerlah cited a number of unexpected complications to the project, from losing six months while persuading the Galveston City Council to allow the work to proceed to having to treat the ship’s ballast water for lead contamination and ship it for disposal as hazardous waste.
“The overall complexity of taking the reactor systems apart was the other major challenge,” Barber told RadWaste Monitor by email after the conference. “This involved considerable engineering and complex cutting/lifting in the field to removal components piece by piece.”
Crews are currently extracting the final two sections of the reactor’s containment vessel, which is expected to wrap up by the middle of this month. That would be followed by packaging and shipping of pipes, contaminated tools, and other “miscellaneous waste” by May and then completion of radiological release surveys of the vessel and dock space so the Army project permit can be terminated, according to Barber.
The 466-foot-long barge will be towed to Brownsville for shipbreaking by a company that has not yet been identified. The Army Corps is in the last stages of setting the terms and conditions for the contract, Barber said.
The Army Corps expects the full project to wrap up by summer 2019. That would leave two more reactors to be decommissioned by the Army branch: landlocked, retired plants at Fort Belvoir, Va., and Fort Greely, Alaska.
The SM-1 power reactor operated from 1957 to 1973 at Fort Belvoir, Va., primarily to train personnel to operate other facilities within the U.S. Army Engineer Reactors Group. At Fort Greely, Alaska, the SM-1A plant had a shorter lifespan: 1962 to 1972, largely to provide electricity and heating steam for utilities on the base.
AECOM-Tidewater JV holds the decommissioning planning contracts for both plants, totaling $8.5 million, according to Barber.
The decommissioning contracts will be separate. The Army expects to issue sources sought notices early this month, and decommissioning planning will continue through the year, according to the Management Symposia presentation. A request for proposals for SM-1 is expected to be issued by March of next year, with the award scheduled for May-June 2020. The SM-1A procurement will be a bit later, with the RFP due in 2021 and the contract award the following year.
The final disposal approaches and decommissioning cost estimates won’t be known until planning is complete, Barber said during the presentation. But the Army Corps anticipates awarding cost-plus reimbursable contracts, possibly with some fixed-price components, for both projects.
Each decommissioning is anticipated to last five years, and each brings its own challenges.
The Fort Belvoir plant has a small footprint, leaving limited room to work. Transporting radioactive waste off-site could mean going past base housing, and the installation is less than 20 miles from Washington, D.C.
“We are very, very close to the D.C. area and the White House, so again security will be very crucial to us,” Barber said at the conference.
At Fort Greely, crews will be working in an isolated area with a limited annual window for operations, possibly just May to September, due to the harsh climate. There is no on-base housing available for the workers, so that will have to be supplied.
Bidding teams will be expected to involve a mix of large and small companies, with a range of expertise in operations including project management, radiological work, demolition, cost estimating, and decommissioning.
