While the coronavirus has delayed some Energy Department nuclear remediation by a few months, completion of key projects is imminent, agency officials said during an online conference Wednesday.
“The last time I saw most of you in person was probably in Phoenix” during March for the Waste Management Symposia, DOE Senior Adviser for Environmental Management William (Ike) White told the virtual Nuclear Cleanup Workshop.
Since then, the COVID-19 pandemic scrambled schedules for DOE’s Environmental Management (EM) office, much as it has for the rest of society. Most of the office’s 16 nuclear cleanup operations moved to minimal on-site operation between mid-March and late-May, non-essential travel such as procurement-related meetings were shelved, and telework became common.
One project being delayed by “a few months” is removal of the High Flux Beam Reactor stack at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, said Elizabeth Connell, EM’s associate principal deputy assistant secretary for regulatory and policy affairs. The stack was supposed to come down by the end of the month under a legal agreement with the state and Environmental Protection Agency.
The parties at Brookhaven mutually agreed to take a force majeure or emergency delay agreement on the demolition, Connell said.
Despite COVID-19, the Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina should begin operating next month, the re-engineered Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at Idaho National Laboratory should be completed by the end of the year and major procurements continue at a brisk pace, officials said during the conference sponsored by Energy Communities Alliance in cooperation with the Energy Communities Alliance (ECA) and the Energy Facilities Contractors Group.
As recently as March, Parsons and DOE expected the SWPF to start operating this spring, and then the pandemic took hold, said Frank Sheppard, the project manager for Parsons. The project will start operating early in October.
The SWPF is designed to eventually process 31 million gallons of radioactive salt waste stored onsite in large underground tanks at the SRS. The tank waste has been called the largest environmental concern in South Carolina, according to SRS Site Operations Manager Mike Budney.
The IWTU is meant to treat 900,000 gallons of sodium-bearing liquid waste from nearby underground waste tanks at the Idaho National Laboratory. Construction was largely finished in 2012, but the unit did not operate as designed. Current contractor, Fluor Idaho has had to extensively re-engineeri the project since then. Work on the project should be finished this year and operations with radioactive waste should begin in 2021, speakers said during the gathering.
In addition, the cleanup office is engaged in “re-contracting the whole footprint” of the weapons complex, said DOE Undersecretary for Science Paul Dabbar. Environmental contracts are in the pipeline for the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, the Paducah Site in Kentucky and INL, he said.
The Office of Environmental Management has been able to accelerate the pace of solicitations in part because of what it calls its “end-state” contracting method. It favors indefinite-delivery-indefinite quantity task orders over the traditional “cost-plus” agreements, Dabbar said. The approach also allows DOE and its contracts to plan for work in smaller chunks rather than devising a detailed year-by-year work schedule for the next 10 years, he said.
The next request for proposals from the DOE remediation office, the Savannah River Site Integrated Management proposal, is expected out by the end of September. Dae Chung, DOE associate principal deputy assistant secretary for corporate services, and procurement official Norbert Doyle reviewed the solicitation this week.
