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 revised legal 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.
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. The changes are based-upon an agreed-upon formula to make up for schedule slippage between March 23, 2020 and March 13, 2022.
The two bookend dates denote the start of DOE’s scaled-back operations across the weapons complex due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resumption this past March of more normal operations, with most people again working onsite most of the time.
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.
