A federal district judge in Eastern Washington this week approved an unopposed request allowing the Department of Energy another year-and-a-half to start solidifying certain radioactive tank waste into glass and other work for the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment Plant.
The ruling Tuesday by Senior U.S. District Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson means DOE and contractor Bechtel can potentially take until Aug. 1, 2025 to complete hot commissioning of direct-feed-low-activity-waste operations at the vitrification plant. That is well beyond the previous deadline of Dec. 31, 2023.
Negotiations between DOE and the office of Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson over how much leeway the feds should be granted due to COVID-19 date back to May 2020. A July 2020 DOE filing on consent decree work noted, for example, that COVID-19 restrictions prevented some work and created extra work. The virus response also made work less efficient, according to DOE.
The judge issued a modified consent decree in December 2020, which laid out a formula on how much additional time DOE would be granted for COVID-related problems. The 2020 order modified the amended consent decree to address schedule slippage by saying one day is added for each day Hanford is in phase 1 of its remobilization (March 23 to Aug. 30, 2020) and 3/4 days are added for each day Hanford is in phase 2 (Aug. 31, 2020, to March 13, 2022).
The deadline adjustment comes out to a total of 579 days.
Like the December 2020 order, the just-released July order is centered around the premise that “the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is a force majeure event that continues to create work interruptions at the Hanford Site,” the judge wrote in the order.
During Phase 3, all fieldwork may resume, although some employees continue to telecommute to some extent with approval of their supervisors, according to DOE.
“There is no court document that calculates an actual reduction of hours in connection with the coronavirus pandemic,” a DOE spokesperson said by email Thursday, responding to a request for DOE documents, memos or court documents tabulating lost hours of work on the Waste Treatment Plant. “COVID-19 safety precautions had greater workforce impacts on some projects than others,” the spokesperson added, pointing to a reduction in onsite workforce, temporary isolation or quarantine of work crews, and national supply chain delays.
The consent decree changes were not opposed by the Washington Department of Ecology, the state regulator of the cleanup at the former plutonium production site. The package of proposed milestone extensions were presented to the court in a June filing by DOE.
While DOE could possibly take nearly two additional years to start making glass at the Waste Treatment Plant, the agency’s top manager at Hanford and the top fed at the agency’s Office of Environmental Management have both reiterated in recent weeks the goal remains to start vitrification by the end of 2023. The DOE pursued the extra time “just to preserve the department’s legal rights,” DOE Hanford manager Brian Vance told the Hanford Advisory Board in late June.
The Government Accountability Office said last month DOE has used “aggressive strategy with optimistic scheduling” at the the Waste Treatment Plant and there is a decent change that difficulty with replacement parts or other glitches could delay direct-feed-low-activity waste operation until mid-2024.
