Bechtel National and its primary subcontractor, AECOM, have created a new company for on-site work at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment Plant (WTP). Bechtel National remains the prime contractor for the WTP project and has total responsibility for delivering the vitrification plant to the Department of Energy, said Peggy McCullough, the company’s project director, in a message to staff Thursday.
Bechtel will subcontract the construction, startup, and commissioning of the vitrification plant to the new company, called Waste Treatment Completion Co., or WTCC, she said.
About 1,370 workers now reporting to Bechtel or AECOM will be assigned to the new company. Union craft workers will become WTCC employees effective March 27 and will have unchanged benefits through the Hanford Site Stabilization Agreement. Bechtel and AECOM nonmanual employees who do work related to plant construction, startup, and commissioning will initially be loaned to WTCC and gradually will be transitioned to the new company. The remainder of the 3,000 workers on the project, conducting operations such as engineering and procurement, will remain direct employees of Bechtel National.
The Department of Energy gave Bechtel permission to subcontract to WTCC as part of recent contract modifications required under a new plan to start treating low-activity radioactive waste at the vitrification plant as soon as 2022. A court-enforced consent decree does not require all parts of the plant to be operational until 2036. Originally, Bechtel and AECOM expected to fully finish construction before the commissioning phase of work, but technical and safety issues related to high-level radioactive waste in 2012 stopped construction on parts of the plant. Now, commissioning of select facilities at the plant — some of it so-called hot commissioning with radioactive waste — is expected to occur while construction continues elsewhere at the facility.
“Having an active nuclear facility within a construction site creates additional environmental and safety challenges,” Scott Oxenford, a WTP-based Bechtel manager who will lead WTCC, said in a Friday press release from the parent company. “WTCC provides a single integrated team with line of sight to both startup and commissioning and construction and enables consolidated decision-making.”
Bechtel’s contract, awarded in 2000, was modified following establishment of a new baseline for work on the project. DOE announced last month both the contract modification and price increase for the plant. The cost of the modification, plus work outside the scope of Bechtel’s contract, brings the total cost of treating low-activity radioactive waste by 2023 to roughly $17 billion. That is about $4.5 billion more than DOE’s previous estimate.
The new subcontractor will support the sequenced approach to start-up of the plant, McCullough said. It is intended to help safely manage challenges, such as a construction site and an active nuclear facility sharing the same footprint. Personnel coming from Bechtel and AECOM will work under the same policies and procedures, as set by the new company.
“Forming WTCC also better supports fulfilling our contract requirement to provide a trained workforce and supporting management systems that can be turned over to a future operating contractor,” McCullough said.
A board of managers from Bechtel National and AECOM will oversee WTCC. McCullough will stay on as “the overall WTP project director,” according to Bechtel’s Friday presser.
“We have a new sequenced approach that will get us to glass sooner,” McCullough told employees, referencing the process for stabilizing up to 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste left behind by decades of plutonium production at Hanford.
