Mike Nartker
WC Monitor
3/14/2014
Bechtel National is soon set to begin moving forward with additional work at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant’s High-Level Waste Facility. In late February, the Department of Energy authorized Bechtel National to begin performing “limited production engineering” activities at the facility, and DOE and Bechtel National are working to a goal of resuming “full production engineering” activities this summer, according to Kevin Smith, head of the Department’s Office of River Protection. “We released a scope of work that we were ready for that we can prove that we had all of the [issues] taken care of,” Smith told WC Monitor last week on the sidelines of the 2014 Waste Management conference, held in Phoenix, Ariz. “It’s things you can do that doesn’t affect a system or kinds of systems that we yet have to perform additional work on,” Smith said.
Work at the WTP’s High-Level Waste Facility—one of the main portions of the overall plant—has largely been suspended since the summer of 2012, when DOE halted most activities due to the need to fully resolve long-standing technical concerns such as ensuring adequate waste mixing and preventing erosion and corrosion. In the interim, the only work performed at the facility has focused on civil construction activities, such as placement of concrete and structural steel, while Bechtel National has performed additional engineering studies to help address the remaining areas of technical concern. Among the “limited production engineering” work to be performed going forward will be efforts to modify designs for some systems identified as posing “high” or “medium” risk to the plant’s operability in a review performed last year by an independent team of experts (WC Monitor, Vol. 25 No. 1).
Bechtel National will also work to develop a System Engineering Management Plan intended to ensure that the HLW Facility’s systems work together as intended as design changes are made; and continue engineering activities to ensure the facility’s design and safety basis are aligned. The contractor is still not allowed, though, to obtain materials or resume construction on those systems covered by the limited production engineering. According to Smith, among the criteria Bechtel National will need to meet before it can resume full production engineering at the HLW Facility is the contractor will have to resolve all open Priority Level 1 findings. “We want them to make sure they’ve done their appropriate due diligence,” he said.
DOE Considering Direct Waste Feed to HLW Facility
The HLW Facility is the centerpiece of the second phase of a three-phase approach DOE laid out to addressing Hanford’s tank waste in a “framework” document released last fall. The first phase entails completing the portions of the WTP with no remaining issues—the Low Activity Waste Facility, the Analytical Laboratory and other ancillary facilities—and to establish an interim pretreatment capability to allow for waste to be directly fed to the LAW Facility for processing. The second phase would focus on completing the HLW Facility, the schedule for which still remains uncertain. DOE is also considering establishing a capability to also directly feed waste to the HLW Facility, which would allow it to begin operation prior to the startup of the Pretreatment Facility.
