Contractors: DOE Should Incentivize Maintenance
Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
10/31/2014
AMELIA ISLAND, Fla.—Maintenance and infrastructure will play an “explicit part” in the budget planning process at the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management in future years, acting Assistant EM Secretary Mark Whitney said last week. Deferred maintenance and infrastructure have been in the spotlight in DOE’s cleanup program since a lack of proper maintenance was found to be a key cause of the Feb. 5 fire at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Industry officials say that those concerns haven’t been budgeted and incentivized enough for contractors. “We actually have to more explicitly consider those types of things in our budgeting process, our across the complex budgeting process. That’s part of what we’ve been discussing as part of our longer-range budgeting and planning effort,” Whitney said at this year’s Weapons Complex Monitor Decisionmakers’ Forum.
Maintenance and infrastructure are already being incorporated into the Fiscal Year 2016 budget planning process currently underway, and will be undertaken to a much greater degree in the FY’17 budget planning process, Whitney said. “In the meantime, of course, at all of our sites [we are] employing the same type of information, looking at infrastructure requirements and deferred maintenance. The simple answer is, we actually make it an explicit part of our budgeting process, making sure we are addressing those,” he said. Given limited budgets there will be impacts on cleanup work schedules. “At the end of the day, once we’ve handled and covered the things that are priorities based on risk and based on compliance, because that’s obviously an important part of what we do and important to a lot of folks, and figure out how to cover our infrastructure and deferred maintenance costs, there are going to be impacts,” he said.
Following the events at WIPP earlier this year, EM asked contractors across the complex to complete extent-of-condition reviews outlining maintenance concerns across the complex. While none of the assessments found immediate safety concerns, several contractors, such as at the Portsmouth D&D project and the Savannah River Site, noted the need for additional resources to help address maintenance backlogs that could pose safety or operational risks in the future.
SRNS: $40 Million Per Year Needed to Address Backlog
Budgeting specifically for maintenance and infrastructure would make a difference, Carol Johnson, President of Savannah River managing contractor Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, said at last week’s meeting. At the Savannah River Site there is no separate account for site infrastructure, and it is instead imbedded with waste management, but Johnson believes that they should be separated. “That would be a recommendation I would have to the Department, to put additional focus specifically on infrastructure,” Johnson said.
Savannah River is also facing a deferred maintenance and infrastructure backlog of “close to a billion dollars,” Johnson said. “The Department can’t deal with that kind of number, that’s unreasonable to ask for. It’s probably not all really required,” she said. “For infrastructure projects ideally we’d like to see somewhere around $30 million to $40 million per year over the next four to five years to work off what we consider to be the highest priority mission impactful infrastructure projects as well as some critical safety equipment for the site.”
‘There Should Be Incentives for Maintenance’
If the Department wants to emphasize maintenance and infrastructure, it should be linked to fee in contracts, industry officials said at the meeting. “The fee award plans, it’s not just how the contractor makes money, but we interpret it as these are the priorities that the customer wants us to work on. They are incentivizing it because they are important,” Fluor Environmental and Nuclear Senior Vice President Greg Meyer said. “So addressing maintenance in a fee award plan sends a signal to all of us that this is a big deal, it’s important and we are willing to pay to get what we want out of the contractor.”
There should be incentives for maintenance, as contractors naturally put resources to where they are getting fee, said Frank Armijo, President of Mission Support Alliance, the contractor providing site services at Hanford. “If you have something that’s maintenance-oriented versus I have to complete this D&D project, you’re going to take resources from one to put in another. The fear is you end up having a hero effect,” he said. “The organization that’s doing maintenance is still trying to make sure things are operating properly. They are going to do whatever it takes to make sure things are going to continue to meet the needs of the project, which is their job. At the same time, certain investments aren’t being made that need to be made. Certain risk-based approaches are not being addressed.”
The issue is an “ongoing challenge” for contractors, Armijo said. “Our customers are being judged often by the communities and the Hill on D&D and cleanup efforts,” he said. “We have to do a better job as companies of communicating the importance of maintenance. Backlogs may grow, but are we dealing with the most important issues with regards to predictive maintenance and single points of failure.”
At WIPP ‘We’ve Definitely Seen the Hero Concept’
The “hero concept” was also present at WIPP before the truck fire and a subsequent radiological release earlier this year, said Jim Blankenhorn, WIPP recovery manager for Nuclear Waste Partnership. “We’ve definitely seen the hero concept. Folks were continually trying to do their job, and trying to do it with fewer and fewer resources. We’ve all heard it, do more with less. Over time, you just don’t see it,” he said. “You start to say, I can do without this tool or piece of equipment. Before long they have an inadequate set of tools to perform their task. A number of our mechanics and craft have come forward as we’ve talked to them and they’ve come to that realization themselves. We really let ourselves degrade, if we had had these things we wouldn’t have had to work nearly as hard and could have kept the things better performing.”
