Staff Reports
WC Monitor
2/5/2016
The Department of Energy Office of River Protection (ORP) at the Hanford Site in Washington state has developed a list of 529 vulnerabilities in the design of the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant’s Low-Activity Waste Facility, all of which it says can be addressed.
The list was developed after ORP commissioned a “find and fix” report to be conducted by teams of outside experts, an exercise done mostly in 2014. The teams found 362 potential problems or needs for improvement, as was reported when a draft of the report was leaked in August. ORP expanded that list based on items pulled from the text of the finalized report and based on other information in the report. “I’m confident that given where we are at and what we found, we can fix these and achieve our goal,” said Bill Hamel, the federal project director for the vitrification plant.
The 529 vulnerabilities identified in the outside expert report are addressed in a review by ORP ordered by Hamel and released last week. It said 52.6 percent of the items had previously been identified. Nearly 37 percent of issues identified are being reviewed after WTP contractor Bechtel National pointed out what it said were numerous inaccuracies in the expert report.
“There appeared to be broad factual accuracy discrepancies and concern with the review process on both sides,” the ORP review said. ORP takes all the vulnerabilities “very, very seriously,” Hamel said. Another 6.2 percent of the vulnerabilities are not covered by the Bechtel contract and would require a contract change or assignment to another contractor. That leaves 4.6 percent of the vulnerabilities that the ORP review classifies as “newly identified.”
Vulnerabilities found at the Low-Activity Waste Facility range from paperwork items that will be relatively simple to address to two particularly complex issues: the adequacy of controls for confinement ventilation systems and quality assurance classification for software that will be used for plant operation.
Both were serious enough for ORP to begin addressing long before the report was completed, and the software quality assurance issue has been resolved, Hamel said. The ORP review includes 10 recommendations that Bechtel has been instructed to address. They start with directions to dispose of all 529 vulnerabilities and also include developing comprehensive worker protection programs, developing an air-flow simulation mode, and evaluating system testing that could be accelerated.
WTP will eventually treat both high- and low-level waste. However, high-level waste treatment will not start until the late 2030s, even under the most optimistic scenario envisioned by Washington state. DOE and the state are currently in court over the planet’s proposed start date, with the agency pushing a 2039 start date and the state gunning for 2034.
The Low-Activity Waste Facility, on the other hand, is expected to come online much earlier; DOE and Washington agree the facility could start treating waste in 2022. However, making that date depends in part on how soon DOE approves a contract modification for WTP prime Bechtel National, which had to redesign the plant to start treating low-level waste before it treats any high-level waste.
Bechtel’s redesign involves so-called “direct-feed low-activity waste” handling, in which low-activity waste is piped directly from underground reservoirs to the treatment facility that will mix the material with glass to create a less-leak-prone solid waste form. Under the design of record, low- and high-level waste would be piped to a pretreatment facility. Construction on that facility would be back-burned once Bechtel’s modification goes through.
Bechtel submitted its direct-feed low-activity waste design to DOE in 2014, leaving the ball in the agency’s court to produce a contract modification that allows construction to move forward. When that will happen is an open question.
Bechtel National’s Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant prime contract with DOE’s Office of River Protection, awarded in 2000, is currently worth roughly $9.6 billion and expires on Aug. 15, 2019.
