The Department of Energy’s latest best- and worst-case estimates for fully cleaning up the Hanford Site in Washington State were each several tens of billions of dollars lower than the previous estimate, though the calculation released this week does not fully include the cost of delays to the site’s crucial High-Level Waste Facility.
The feds expect “active cleanup” to continue until 2078 with “stewardship” a good bet to extend until 2100, according to the 2022 Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule and Cost Report submitted the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Washington state Department of Ecology on Jan. 31.
The report, which DOE updates every three years, includes “scope, schedule and costs that are current as of August 31, 2021,” the agency wrote in the 244-page assessment. That means the report does not include a full accounting of cost increases related to Hanford’s High Level Waste Facility and an associated Pretreatment Facility, which DOE has acknowledged may not be ready to solidify Hanford’s most contaminated, radioactive liquid-waste by a court-ordered date of 2036.
The 2019 version of the report said to expect final cleanup of the former plutonium production for national military purposes put the tab at between $323 billion to $677 billion. Each report provides both a low-range and a high-range cost estimate. The high-dollar scenario “fully incorporates the realization of risks associated with uncertainty in discrete elements of work,” according to the executive summary.
Given the lower-cost or baseline case, DOE envisions “active cleanup” continuing at Hanford into 2078, followed by “long-term-stewardship” until at least 2095, probably longer.
The low-range estimate includes estimated completion dates for radioactive tank waste retrieval and treatment from the revised milestones contained in the 2018 Third Amended Consent Decree for Hanford cleanup approved by a federal district court.
While this baseline scenario acknowledges the chance of technical glitches arising when the Waste Treatment Plant starts converting low-level radioactive waste into glass by the end of 2023, problems could be “offset” by improvements in glass-making efficiency, according to the report.
But the baseline scenario “does not account for delays associated with COVID-19 and makes other technical assumptions that have not been proven to be implementable,” according to the report.
But the report’s gray-sky scenario seems to more fully acknowledge Murphy’s Law.
“In contrast, the high-range estimate accounts for the impact of these and other technical challenges across all PBSs [project baseline summaries], and is intended to ensure transparency among all Hanford stakeholders of the inherent risks in achieving the agreed upon cleanup goals (i.e., milestones).”
The state, DOE and EPA are signers of the Tri-Party Agreement on Hanford cleanup, which under a 2010 modification, required regular updates on the big picture at the property, considered one of the most radiologically and chemically contaminated in the world.
“The report serves as a foundation for preparing budget requests and for ongoing engagement with regulators and stakeholders,” a DOE spokesperson said Wednesday.
Starting Feb. 15, the agency will kick off a 60-day comment period on the latest life cycle cost report and the feedback will be considered when DOE puts together the next report, due out in 2025.
