Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
6/5/2015
The Department of Energy expects to complete within “the next several weeks” an evaluation of options for adding additional oversight capability at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, acting Assistant Secretary of Energy for Environmental Management Mark Whitney said late this week. In the wake of calls for DOE to enlist an “owner’s agent” at the Hanford vit plant to aid in overseeing the work of WTP contractor Bechtel National, the Department has been examining ways to bring in additional expertise for the project. “We believe that there are other models that could also provide benefits for the project,” Whitney said at a meeting of the Energy Facility Contractors Group. “So we’re looking through a range of options to make sure we have expertise on the ground that we need, recognizing the benefits to each. We’re in the middle of that process right now,” Whitney said. “We want to do what we think is best for the project.”
Among those that have proposed DOE bring in an owner’s agent at the WTP was a panel of independent experts, who made the recommendation last year in a design and operability review performed on the WTP’s High-Level Waste Facility. “There is currently no organization, independent of the project, reporting directly to DOE with the necessary technical skills, experience, responsibility, accountability, and authority to impact these generally longer term issues,” the panel said in its findings. In May, the Government Accountability Office recommended in a report that DOE “enlist the services of another agency or external entity” to serve as an owner’s agent at the WTP. “In the absence of employing aggressive risk mitigation strategies, DOE will have little assurance that technical challenges will be solved or that emerging ones will be mitigated in design, which may result in portions of facilities’ designs either being unchecked or progressing significantly before problems are identified,” the GAO said.
White House Pushing Back Against Senate-Proposed Requirement for Owner’s Agent
Most notably, the Senate version of the FY 2016 National Defense Authorization Act would require DOE to enlist an owner’s agent at the WTP and specifies how such a capability should be established. As envisioned by the Senate bill, the owner’s agent for the WTP would be “a private third-party entity with nuclear safety management expertise and without any contractual relationship” to Bechtel National. The owner’s agent would be tasked with providing “design, construction, nuclear safety, and operability oversight” for each of the Hanford vit plant’s main facilities. No later than one year after the bill went into effect, the owner’s agent would also be responsible for “ensuring that the preliminary documented safety analyses for all facilities covered by the contract meet the requirements of all applicable Department of Energy regulations and guidance,” according to the text of the bill. DOE’s owner’s agent would also be responsible for ensuring that Bechtel National acts “promptly” to resolve unreviewed safety questions.
The White House, though, came out this week against the owner’s agent-related provision in the Senate defense policy bill. In a statement of Administration policy, the White House said it objects to the Senate bill “to the extent that it would establish an owner’s representative to carry out certain inherently governmental activities, such as the direct oversight of another contractor and the resolution of nuclear safety issues.” The Senate bill “would interfere with the relationship between DOE and its representative by prescribing the representative’s duties,” the White House said, going on to state that the bill “also inappropriately mandates completion of updated preliminary documented safety analyses before technical issues associated with the WTP are resolved and necessary design changes are identified.”
