The Energy Department and contractor AECOM said Thursday the last phase of building demolition is finished at the Separations Process Research Unit (SPRU) in upstate New York and cleanup should be completed this fall.
A two-year demolition project for Buildings H2 and G2 ended last month on the property located at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory, a research facility created by the Atomic Energy Commission. The primary SPRU facilities, including H2 and G2, were built in the late 1940s to advance the chemical separation of plutonium for nuclear weapons. In 1953 the buildings were retired and the facilities were flushed and drained.
As of mid-2017, more than 15 acres of land had been remediated at SPRU and more than 85 process vessels and tanks had been removed and shipped off-site. Remaining tasks include removing concrete debris, along with backfilling and restoring the work area.
“Safely completing demolition of Building H2 is a major achievement for our team,” Keith Stone, AECOM’s SPRU disposition project manager, said in a DOE news release. “With the backfill of the H2 excavation and environmental restoration of the SPRU site, we will have achieved DOE’s goal of eliminating the risks inherent in these 60-year-old facilities.”
This spring, DOE submitted an application to the state Department of Environmental Conservation for a hazardous waste permit to store mixed transuranic waste at the Schenectady County, N.Y., site for up to 10 years. The 24 containers of waste hold equipment, components, residues, and other material from the buildings, the state has said.
The Energy Department expects the waste will be sent to its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico by 2025.
Things have not always gone smoothly at SPRU. AECOM subsidiary URS and the Energy Department are engaged in a long-running arbitration dispute about a cost cap on the contract.
AECOM became involved with the SPRU project by virtue of its 2014 purchase of site cleanup contractor URS. By the time the new parent company arrived on the scene, the remediation program had already encountered a number of setbacks.
That included a 2010 radiological release and a 2011 hurricane that contributed to mudslides and delayed key decontamination and disposal operations for 16 months. As detailed in financial filings by AECOM, the company and Energy Department disagree on how much responsibility each side bears for various missed deadlines and cost overruns.
As of this past January, AECOM has billed DOE for more than $427 million, and total costs were forecast to reach up to $460 million at project completion. Ask for an update to this figure. While it has accepted $180 million in payments, DOE had not reimbursed nearly $250 million of the amount invoiced.
The Energy Department issued the original $67 million cost-plus contract to URS in December 2007 with completion targeted by the end of 2011.
In summer 2016, DOE retained an outside firm, C2G International, to help its resolve the SPRU dispute.
