Hanford Advisory Board Concerned About Future Budgets for Richland
WC Monitor
6/19/2015
The Hanford Advisory Board is concerned that the Department of Energy is planning to significantly underfund Hanford cleanup in budgets currently under development, the Board said in advice to DOE and Hanford regulators. The board acknowledged that after years of budgets that failed to provide enough money to meet cleanup requirements at Hanford it is almost impossible to develop budgets for fiscal 2016 and 2017 that meet them now. “Current budgets fall far short of meeting those agreements (between DOE and the state of Washington) and place both the environment and public safety at ever increasing risk,” the board said in its consensus advice.
DOE said when it opened public discussion on the fiscal 2017 budget in late April that the budget would need to double from its present level to meet environmental cleanup requirements. DOE has released little detail on the fiscal 2017 budget for work under the Hanford Office of River Protection. The plans and milestones for that work are being discussed in federal court after DOE has been unable to meet milestones set in a 2010 court-enforced consent decree. The court process excludes public input or review and may result in funding decisions that vary widely from advisory board and public priorities, the board said in its advice. It seems reasonable to expect that the Hanford budgets will change significantly after a new court order is issued, the board said.
The board is concerned that the fiscal 2017 budget proposal, which had limited information shared publicly, does not appear to include money to retrieve waste from two problematic tanks. One of 28 newer double-shell tanks, Tank AY-102, has waste leaking between its shells, and Tank T-111, one of 149 older single shell tanks, is leaking waste into the ground. The board also is pressing for new tanks to be built to securely hold waste because of delays in getting the waste treated for disposal. The soonest the vitrification plant might start treating any of the waste is 2022.
Elsewhere at Hanford the board is concerned about a loss of momentum to finish up some of the remaining and challenging cleanup work along the Columbia River. Money for the cleanup of the spill under the 324 Building needs to be given a higher priority in fiscal 2016, the board agreed. For work under the Hanford Richland Operations Office, DOE listed projects by priority to show which ones it would proceed with depending on how much money is available. The highly radioactive contamination beneath the 324 Building appears to be fairly stable now and the building acts as a shield from its radiation and prevents precipitation from reaching it. But the water lines supporting the building’s aged fire suppression system have a history of failing and water could cause contamination to migrate toward the river if another failure were to go undetected, the board said.
For years the board has followed the development of plans to clean up the waste dumped down pipes buried vertically in the ground in the 618-10 Burial Ground in the river corridor, including containers of liquid radioactive waste. The board is encouraged that casings have been driven into the ground around the pipes and that trained crews are waiting for direction from DOE to start retrieving the waste, but less than a year and a half remains under Washington Closure Hanford’s extended contract, it said. “If the crews are not given the direction to proceed, they will be disbanded,” the board said. “All of the money spent to plan the work and train the workers will be wasted.” Once the 618-10 Burial Ground is cleaned up, work should start on the similar 618-11 Burial Ground near Energy Northwest’s commercial nuclear power plant on leased Hanford land, the board said. “We should move crews from one to another right on top of each other,” said board member Shelley Cimon. “We have the trained workforce.” Having the 324 Building and the 618-10 and -11 Burial Grounds cleaned up by a Tri-Party Agreement milestone in 2018 is not possible, said Dennis Faulk, Hanford program manager for the Environmental Protection Agency. Now cleanup of the 618-11 Burial Ground could be finished anytime between 2020 to 2047 according to current information from DOE, he said. He encouraged the board to include its wishes on the 618-11 Burial Ground in its letter of advice if it wanted the work done sooner rather than later.
The board asked that money be available to remove cesium and strontium capsules now held under water in the central Hanford Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility as soon as possible. The capsules account for a third of the radioactivity at Hanford. “In the event of a major earthquake, which is now recognized as possible, these wastes could be exposed to air causing a massive radiation release,” the board said. The board also made a pitch for adequate funding for its own meetings and other public meetings. The board might have to reduce its number of all-member meetings from five to four under the proposed fiscal 2016 budget. It already has stopped holding meetings in cities such as Seattle and Portland because of continued budget reductions, it said. Decreasing the board’s budget works against DOE’s stated goal to increase transparency and receive public opinion, the board said. The board also wants DOE to resume annual State of the Site meetings that allow the public to ask questions of senior managers of DOE and its regulators and provide input on priorities and public concerns.
