The Department of Energy could take steps to reduce the cost, shorten the schedule, and increase the efficiency of environmental remediation at the Hanford Site in Washington state, according to the agency’s top nuclear cleanup official.
Anne White made her fifth trip to Hanford last week on the first anniversary of her March 29, 2018, swearing-in as assistant secretary for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management.
Her latest visit to the massively contaminated former plutonium production complex also coincided with Senate and House Appropriations hearings on the Trump administration’s fiscal 2020 budget request for the Energy Department. During the hearings, Energy Secretary Rick Perry was repeatedly questioned about the new Hanford life-cycle cost estimate released at the end of January.
The new estimate, which Perry called “shocking,” increased the 2016 estimate of the remaining cost of work plus a few years of post-cleanup monitoring at Hanford from about $108 billion to $323 billion to $677 billion. Much of the estimated remaining expense — $221 billion to $518 billion — was related to Hanford’s 56 million gallons of radioactive tank waste, including treating it for disposal.
“We’ve been on a path for a long time to building facilities designed and conceived 20 years ago,” White said in an interview. But in those years, technologies have improved and new waste disposal options have become available, she noted.
Work began in 2000 on the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant, with ground broken for construction in 2002 on the facility designed to convert the radioactive waste into a glass form for disposal. At the time, the plan was to dispose of vitrified low-activity waste in shallow burial at Hanford. Vitrified high-level waste is required to be disposed of at a deep geological repository for high-level waste, which the nation does not yet have.
The Energy Department is considering different approaches to both low-activity and high-level radioactive tank waste treatment to drive performance and move the schedule left, White said.
A July audit done by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers at the Energy Department’s request considered whether construction on the Waste Treatment Plant’s two main facilities that would handle high-level waste could be completed by milestones set in 2016 by a federal court. Construction has been paused on the plant’s High-Level Waste Facility and Pretreatment Facility since 2012 to address technical issues related to the radioactive material. The federal court consent decree requires the first facility to be substantially built in 2030 and the second in 2031.
At planned funding levels of $690 million per year, there is less than a 10% chance those milestones would be met, according to the audit. The work would require $2 billion to $2.5 billion annually starting in 2023 to meet both milestones, the Army Corps found. But if construction continued only on the High-Level Waste Facility and annual funding was increased to $800 million starting in 2020, its 2030 construction milestone likely could be met.
The Energy Department has analyzed alternatives in response to the Army Corps audit results, including feeding high-level waste directly to the High-Level Waste Facility at the vitrification plant, White said. The alternatives are now under independent review.
The Pretreatment Facility was planned to separate tank waste into low-activity and high-level waste streams. With construction on hold at the Pretreatment Facility and a consent decree milestone to start treating low-activity waste by 2023, the Energy Department is pursuing a direct-feed approach that would deliver to the Low-Activity Waste Facility a low activity waste stream separated from tank waste in the tank farms. A similar approach might be possible for high-level waste, again bypassing the Pretreatment Facility, White said.
The Energy Department also is pursuing the Test Bed Initiative for processing Hanford’s low-activity tank waste. It could be less expensive to treat and solidify low-activity tank waste commercially and then ship it for disposal to a Waste Control Specialists disposal cell for low-level government waste in Texas, according to the Energy Department.
Proposed end-state contracts, including for the Hanford tank farms and central Hanford cleanup, are also a method to drive efficiencies, White said. The current tank farm and central Hanford cleanup contracts expire in September and are expected to be replaced with end-state contracts.
At Hanford and other DOE sites where cleanup will continue for decades, “scope can get a little sloppy, a little far off,” according to White. Focusing on end states, or completion of specific scopes of work, can help provide a sense of start, middle, and end to projects, she said.
Using a cost-plus-incentive-fee model for the new contracts can help drive contractor performance, she said. “Contractors get a share of every dollar they save,” she said. Not only does work get done, but corners are not cut because contractors know that if it is not done safely, the project is shut down. That’s costly, and contractors lose potential shared savings, she said: “There is a lot to be said for contracting models and the way they can drive performance and drive behavior.”
