Contractor inexperience with big-ticket projects and the Department of Energy’s failure to fully account for risks contributed to mushrooming cost and a three-year slide in schedule for the new underground ventilation system at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, according to a government watchdog report published Tuesday.
Since 2018, the cost estimate for the Safety Significant Confined Ventilation System (SSCVS) at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) has risen dramatically from the initial $288-million and the operation date slid from 2023 to 2026, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
As of October 2021, the project was expected to cost about $486 million, about 70% more than first planned, with a completion date of January 2026, GAO said. That is only slightly different from the update — of $494-million and final approval in June 2026 — offered by DOE and prime contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership at the Waste Management Symposia last week in Phoenix.
For big capital projects, DOE bosses for WIPP must follow the agency’s Order 413.3B, according to the GAO report. The order requires DOE’s Office of Program Management to do “an independent and objective root cause analysis to determine the underlying causes of the cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortcomings.”
The DOE finished a root cause analysis on the SSCVS in April 2021, but is not required to draft a corrective action plan, GAO said.
The agency’s analysis said Nuclear Waste Partnership “hired an unqualified subcontractor to perform the primary construction responsibilities of this project,” according to GAO.
The original sub, Christensen Building Group and its Critical Applications Alliance, was terminated by the Amentum-led prime and subsequently replaced by a Kiewit subsidiary. The original subcontractor sued Nuclear Waste Partnership in federal court and the case was settled in June 2021.
Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP) also failed to fully gauge the overall impacts of 200 engineering changes and how the tweaks affected cost and timeline, GAO said. “[T]he contractor did not properly evaluate subcontractors and awarded a $135 million Construction subcontract to an entity that did not have adequate qualifications to perform certain construction responsibilities for the project,” GAO said.
The risk analysis last year also pointed to a long-running problem at the transuranic waste disposal site near Carlsbad, N.M., according to the GAO report.
“DOE and contractors have not found viable solutions to incentivize personnel to work and stay in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant area,” GAO said, adding turnover is a big problem.
Since a February 2014 underground radiation leak, ventilation hinders WIPP operations because air must be filtered after passing through the contaminated areas, and WIPP has limited air filtering ability, GAO said. Because of this, WIPP is limited to doing one of its three vital tasks at a time—maintenance, salt mining or waste disposal. It cannot currently multi-task these jobs. The SSCVS is meant to fix this by increasing underground airflow nearly three-fold.
