Some information of the well decommissioning program at the Hanford Site in Washington state has not been kept up-to-date, the Department of Energy’s Inspector General’s Office said in an audit report released Friday.
The audit was a follow-up to a January 2005 audit on well decommissioning activities, which found numerous problems. Wells are used at Hanford to monitor for contamination and to extract contaminates.
After the 2005 audit DOE developed a comprehensive well decommissioning plan and closed a number of wells using funds from the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The report released Friday said DOE was effectively decommissioning wells, but that only the well decommissioning plan’s appendixes had been updated since 2008.
The full plan must be updated to improve continuity of the program through contract transition, the audit report said. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., which manages soil and groundwater remediation at Hanford, has a 10-year contract now set to expire at the end of September. The Energy Department has said it plans to extend the contract for up to a year.
Also in response to the earlier audit, changes were made to the well database, the Hanford Environmental Information System (HEIS), and the Well Attributes Materialized View system was developed to provide a visual representation of the data in the HEIS covering 12,000 decommissioned and other wells.
The updated audit picked 15 wells to check and found that CH2M did not document inspection dates in the HEIS for 10 of them. For some of the remaining five, the materialized view did not show the most recent inspection dates.
“Documenting well inspections in the database ensures that the Department has promptly identified any wells that are in disrepair,” the audit report said. “Wells in disrepair can provide potential pathways for contaminants to reach the groundwater, endangering human health and the environment.”
The Energy Department took immediate action to enter inspection dates in the HEIS and is working to develop procedures to assure inspection dates are entered into the system, the audit report said.
