Bechtel National is more than halfway finished designing a facility crucial to starting a long-delayed cleanup of liquid radioactive waste in Washington state by 2022, but the company and the Energy Department are still haggling over the contract changes needed to actually build the facility, agency and industry representatives said Tuesday.
That is according to Peggy McCullough, Waste Treatment Plant project director for San Francisco-based Bechtel National, and Ben Harp, assistant manager for startup and commissioning for DOE’s Office of River Protection at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash. The two spoke to Weapons Complex Morning Briefing on a company-organized conference call.
Bechtel is building the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) at Hanford to turn 56 million gallons of mostly liquid chemical and radioactive waste left over from Cold War-era plutonium production — including less-contaminated low-activity waste and more dangerous high-level waste — into more easily storable glass canisters via the vitrification method. In a departure from DOE’s original plan, vitrification will begin with low-activity waste only, which will be piped directly in for vitrification from the waste storage tank farm in a process dubbed direct feed low-activity waste, or DFLAW.
This week, McCullough said, marks the 60-percent design review for the DFLAW Effluent Management Facility, which will treat very slightly radioactive water left over from low-activity waste vitrification. Most of the Effluent Management Facility’s structure should be complete by May 2018. Bechtel would then start up the facility in 2019 and complete its commissioning in January 2020, McCullough said.
Bechtel aims to complete design of DFLAW as a whole by May 31, 2017, McCullough said.
The Effluent Management Facility is the least far along of all the DFLAW infrastructure; its construction requires three major modifications to the company’s permit with Washington state, the last of which will be turned in for approval by Olympia in fall 2017, Bechtel spokesman Todd Nelson wrote in a Tuesday email.
To complete the remaining DFLAW work, Bechtel will need a modification to its $11.3 billion WTP prime contract — something the company has been negotiating with DOE for about two years. The modification will allow Bechtel to continue work on the Effluent Management Facility, and prepare WTP to operate in a low-activity-waste-only mode that requires less power and personnel than full-scale waste treatment.
DOE hopes this modification will be ready around the same time the agency signs off on a new cost and schedule estimate for low-activity waste treatment at Hanford, Harp said.
“It’s preferable to have them done at the same time so they don’t diverge at some point, but it all depends on the negotiations,” Harp said.
The updated estimate, a rebaseline in agency parlance, is under review at DOE headquarters and is expected to be signed by Sept, 30, the end of the government’s 2016 fiscal year, Harp said Tuesday.
What DFLAW work Bechtel has done so far, primarily design activities, was funded under three change orders signed in 2014 and worth about $32 million. Most of the total, some $23 million, is for design work. The single largest chunk of that, $19 million or so, is for design of the Effluent Management Facility. Another $9 million was for physical modifications to WTP infrastructure to support low-activity-only waste processing.
DOE’s latest public cost estimate for building WTP, $12.3 billion, is over 10 years old. The rebaseline now under review at agency headquarters covers only the part of the plant dealing with low-activity waste. The full cost is expected to rise “a lot,” Monica Regalbuto, DOE’s assistant secretary for environmental management, said in congressional testimony in March. Processing of high-activity waste is due to begin by 2036.
