A new $3 billion modification for the Hanford Site Waste Treatment Plant project makes clear the Energy Department and contractor Bechtel National intend to meet their 2022 schedule for beginning liquid-waste treatment, without closing the door on a legally authorized delay into 2023.
For years, Bechtel and DOE have said the facility the company is building at Hanford — under a contract now worth about $14.6 billion — could start treating the site’s less-radioactive, low-activity waste in 2022 before processing sludgier, more-radioactive high-level waste.
Legally, the agency and its contractor have until Dec. 31, 2023, to be ready to begin treating low-activity waste, under a consent decree last amended in March.
The contract modification, posted Thursday to the Hanford website, lists project funding levels and award fees only through 2022; the contract itself is a completion contract ending on Dec. 31, 2022. Incentive fees are also weighted toward that year: for example: “75% of the Startup and Commissioning PBI [performance-based incentive] pool will be earned upon the successful demonstration of hot commissioning by January 15, 2022.”
However, there is no language requiring that the work be completed in 2022, and penalties for stretching past the planned schedule appear to be restricted to reduced incentive fees. Bechtel’s fees in this contract are no small matter: the company stands to earn up to $57.4 million in award fees from 2016 to 2022, and the start-up and commissioning PBI for three segments of the WTP — the Low-Activity Waste Facility, Balance of Facilities, and Analytical Laboratory — is over $159 million.
A future contract modification will address the completion date for the WTP’s High-Level Waste and Pretreatment facilities, according to the new document. A federal judge has ruled that treatment of high-level waste must begin by 2036.
Broadly speaking, the long-awaited agreement allows Bechtel to move forward with work necessary for starting low-activity waste treatment separately from high-level waste treatment.
Washington state’s chief environmental agency reacted optimistically to the modification this week.
“The new contract contains strong financial incentives to complete projects on time along with strong financial disincentives for missing deadlines,” Alex Smith, director of the state Ecology Department’s Nuclear Waste Program, wrote in an email Tuesday. “These new performance-based measures should help ensure that these projects continue to meet current milestones.”
“We are confident that the modified contract and baseline represents the most effective and expeditious path towards beginning tank waste treatment at Hanford as soon as practicable,” Kevin Smith, manager of DOE’s Office of River Protection, said in a department press release about the updated WTP contract.
“The new contract modification affords the clearest path to vitrifying Hanford’s tank waste as soon as possible,” Peggy McCullough, Bechtel’s WTP project director, said in the company’s press release.
Hanford’s high-level and low-activity waste are mingled together in massive underground tanks managed by another DOE contractor, the AECOM-led Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS). The tank farms house a combined 56 million gallons of primarily liquid chemical and radioactive waste: byproducts of plutonium production for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
WTP will mix Hanford’s liquid waste with molten glass to create more easily-storable solid cylinders through a process called vitrification.
At one point, DOE and Bechtel thought WTP would begin treating both high-level and low-activity waste around 2020. However, the agency halted much of the work on WTP’s high-level waste facilities in 2012 after a whistleblower at a Bechtel subcontractor raised safety concerns about the proposed technical approach for high-level waste treatment.
Work on WTP’s low-activity waste facility has continued more or less uninterrupted, but whether low-activity waste treatment actually begins in 2022 is not entirely up to Bechtel.
In late November, WRPS said a facility it is building at Hanford might not be able to pipe low-activity waste to WTP until 2028 because of an ongoing legal dispute over worker safety at the tank farms.
Washington state, the Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 598, and the nonprofit nuclear watchdog Hanford Challenge want a federal judge to mandate more protective gear, including supplied air, to protect Hanford workers from toxic tank farm fumes. WRPS argues the gear, which is difficult to work in, would drastically slow the pace of labor at the tank farms, and may not be needed to protect tank hands from the periodic vapor leaks to which some sickened workers have reported exposure over the years.
WRPS spokesman Rob Roxburgh did not reply to a request for comment this week.
Including expenses outside WTP Bechtel’s contract, DOE estimates it will cost nearly $17 billion just to treat Hanford’s low-activity waste.
Much of the infrastructure needed to treat Hanford’s low-level liquid waste — electrical and plumbing systems, the Analytical Lab that helps determine exact treatment methods for different batches of tank waste — is already in place and nearly ready to switch on.
A notable exception is the Effluent Management Facility being designed to treat very slightly radioactive water left over from low-activity waste treatment. That facility just marked its 60-percent design review earlier this year, and should be mostly built by 2018, Bechtel has said.
In March, a federal judge ruled WTP must begin treating all of Hanford’s liquid waste, regardless of category, by 2036.
