Demolition of the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant might stretch beyond a Sept. 30 regulatory deadline, the manager of the Energy Department’s Richland Operations Office told a citizens group Wednesday.
While there is a “high probability we can get it done by the end of this year,” the project might only be “near-done by the end of this year,” Doug Shoop said during a meeting of the agency-chartered Hanford Advisory Board in Richland, Wash.
Between harsh winter weather and a radioactive contamination incident in late January that has halted demolition, DOE and contractor CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. have lost more than a month of work days at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) since demolition began in November.
At a January board meeting, before the radiation incident, Shoop told members of the locally staffed group that demolition was running on time, despite the winter weather.
Then came the radiation contamination, which was detected at the end of the workday on Jan. 27. Of the demolition workers subsequently tested for exposure, some had contamination on their protective outerwear, but none had contamination on their skin or in their nasal passageways.
Demolition was halted after the incident and still has not resumed, a DOE spokesman said Wednesday, more than 30 days after the event.
The PFP was once used to shape plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. The Department of Energy must tear down the plant to the concrete slab on which it was built by Sept. 30. The work was supposed to be finished by Sept. 30, 2016, but unexpected contamination, accidents on the job, and equipment difficulties prompted DOE to ask for a one-year extension, which the Washington state Ecology Department granted last summer.
Sept. 30 is the end of the U.S. government’s fiscal year.
WTP: ‘Under-Promise, Over Deliver’
Hanford’s Office of River Protection and Bechtel National, prime contractor on the site’s Waste Treatment Plant (WTP), are positioning themselves to ramp up liquid waste treatment ahead of legally binding deadlines established by a federal judge in 2016.
DOE last year finalized a contract modification with Bechtel that will allow the company to start modifying parts of WTP so the facility can treat Hanford’s low-activity waste early next decade. The low-activity waste takes up more space but is less radioactive than the sludgier high-level waste a federal judge said WTP must start processing by 2036. All told, there are 56 million gallons of liquid waste at Hanford, left over from Cold War-era plutonium production.
As part of the amended consent decree the federal judge handed down covering Hanford’s liquid waste cleanup, Bechtel must start processing low-activity waste by Dec. 31, 2023. However, the company’s amended contract provides significant financial incentives for starting up low-activity treatment in 2022, William Hamel, assistant manager and federal project director for WTP at the Office of River Protection, told the Hanford Advisory Board on Wednesday.
“The contract beats the consent decree,” Hamel said, part of what he called an “under-promise, over-deliver” philosophy for WTP.
Similarly, Bechtel believes it can complete construction on the parts of WTP needed for low-activity waste treatment by 2018, which is two years sooner than the amended consent decree requires, Hamel said.
Funding is a sticking point for this pace of work — a concern thrown into sharp relief this week as President Donald Trump announced his administration will seek what amounts to a 10-percent cut for discretionary, nonmilitary federal spending in fiscal 2018 to pay for a proposed budget boost at the Pentagon.
“We have every indication that our funding for FY 17 is what we need and what we need to move forward,” Hamel said. “We can handle small perturbations, but obviously, large perturbations affect our project schedule.”
