Bechtel National and the Energy Department could have saved about $2 million if they had reached an agreement to cancel orders for equipment the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) did not urgently need, the agency’s inspector general wrote in a new report.
Bechtel is building the plant at the site near Richland, Wash., to treat 56 million gallons of radioactive waste left by Cold War plutonium production. After federal budget cuts in 2011 and safety concerns in 2012 prompted DOE to halt construction of key parts of the plant, Bechtel put some WTP procurements on the back burner and canceled others.
Among 28 procurements Bechtel targeted for cancellation in January 2015, the five most expensive were three vessels intended to process nuclear waste, along two evaporators that help boil water out of liquid waste mixtures now stored underground at Hanford, the IG said in a report released late Friday.
DOE and Bechtel squabbled over whose responsibility it was to kill these five big-ticket items, the inspector general wrote. Bechtel wanted DOE to concur, in writing, with the company’s recommendations to cancel certain procurements. The contractor felt this would help it “avoid any questions regarding actions taken on the procurements in the future,” the IG wrote.
This DOE refused to do, asserting the call was Bechtel’s to make, and that the agency had to avoid managing Bechtel’s subcontractors, which the department is not contractually allowed to do, the IG wrote.
So instead, the procurements remained in limbo as of Jan. 4 2017, with the orders neither fulfilled nor terminated, the IG said.
“Had these procurements been terminated, these funds could have been used to accomplish other tasks on the WTP [Waste Treatment Plant] project,” the inspector general wrote in its report, “Management of Suspended Procurements at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant Project.”
A Bechtel spokesperson said the company has already made progress on a plan to use several of the five items called out in the inspector general’s report in parts of WTP other than those for which they were intended.
“Since the IG’s on-site visit, Bechtel National and the Office of River Protection have worked to address questions on the suspended procurements,” the company representative said by email Tuesday. “In fact, we have jointly identified an innovative way to potentially repurpose equipment originally purchased for WTP’s Pretreatment Facility for use in the Effluent Management Facility. One of the evaporators and four of the vessels may be used in the Effluent Management Facility.”
