Stricter safety measures for workers mean the Energy Department will likely blow deadlines to drain radioactive waste from tanks at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., over the next four to eight years, an official with the agency’s Office of River Protection said Wednesday.
Schedule pressure resulted from “inefficiencies we’re seeing because of a number of things, including scuba use in tank farms that wasn’t planned for,” Kevin Smith, manager of the Office of River Protection, said in a webcast meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board citizens group.
DOE officially notified the Washington Department of Ecology in writing late Tuesday, Smith said. Ecology had not released the document at deadline for Weapons Complex Morning Briefing.
Under the terms of a consent decree — which a federal judge amended in March to give DOE more time to empty these tanks and perform other cleanup work at Hanford — the agency was supposed to drain waste from at least five single-shell tanks in by 2020, and four more by early 2024.
Hanford’s underground tanks contain chemical and radioactive waste byproducts from Cold War-era plutonium production for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal. There are more than 100 tanks on site, which in total contain more than 55 millions gallons of waste. DOE wants to transfer waste from single-shelled tanks to studied, though not leak-proof, double-shelled tanks.
After union demands earlier this year, Hanford tank workers have increasingly worn scuba-like breathing equipment and supplied air for close-proximity tank work after some personnel reported falling ill following possible exposure to toxic tank vapors. It takes workers longer to carry the heavy gear to the job site with them, and to take it on and off, and to change out air supplies periodically.
Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 508, along with watchdog group Hanford Challenge, has also sued DOE and Washington River Protection Solutions, the AECOM-led tank farm prime contractor, to force additional worker protections from vapor exposure. Washington state has joined the lawsuit alongside the plaintiffs in the U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington. While the plaintiffs have argued for increased use of breathing gear at Hanford, no one has argued the gear makes work anything but slower.
