Costs will soar and deadlines will go unmet at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., if workers there keep wearing gear to protect them from noxious fumes leaking from underground waste tanks, the Energy Department and its tank-farm contractor said this week.
In documents published Wednesday, the AECOM-led Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) estimated the cost of emptying certain tanks in the A, AX, and C farms will rise nearly 50 percent to $705 million and take nearly a decade longer than planned, if workers continue wearing scuba-like gear on the job.
As part of the consent decree governing Hanford cleanup, DOE and its contractor must empty 12 single-shell tanks in the A, AX, and C farms by 2024. DOE has already drained two of the three C tanks covered by the law, leaving 10 to go under this particular consent-decree milestone.
However, if a federal judge requires workers to wear protective gear and supplied air whenever they get within 200 feet of the tanks — as the Plumbers and Steamfitters Local Union 508 representing Hanford workers requested in a lawsuit filed last year — it would take until 2033 to empty these remaining 10 tanks, according to WRPS’ latest published analysis.
Under those working conditions, DOE might bump the last C tank, C-105, to the head of the cleanup queue and empty it in 2020, according to the WRPS analysis.
Meeting the union’s demand “is neither cost efficient, nor executable, or achievable with the existing Hanford site infrastructure,” WRPS wrote in its analysis. “In addition, performing work in this manner creates additional potential safety issues that have not yet been evaluated.”
“Their position is ludicrous,” Tom Carpenter, executive director of the Seattle-based Hanford Challenge nonprofit nuclear watchgroup that is a co-plaintiff in the worker safety lawsuit, said in a Thursday phone interview with Weapons Complex Monitor. “Hanford is creating these worst-case scenarios so they can go back to not wearing supplied air. That means more workers will get hurt, and that is not an acceptable solution.”
A longtime Hanford watchdog, Carpenter said it should be “everybody’s goal to get engineered controls in place and get away from using supplied air,” but that self-contained breathing equipment is necessary until DOE and WRPS put other protective equipment in place, such as charcoal filters for the tanks.
Actual delays will depend on any additional safety measures DOE is ordered to put in place — and there are several in-between scenarios in WRPS’ latest estimate that forecast less-severe scenarios than the company’s worst case.
Still, DOE has formally notified Washington state some delay is probable, Kevin Smith, manager of DOE’s Office of River Protection, said Wednesday in a webcast meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board citizens group.
Hanford’s A, AX and C tanks, like all Hanford liquid-waste tanks, contain radioactive and toxic byproducts of Cold War-era plutonium production. These particular tanks are in the easternmost reaches of the site’s 75-square-mile 200 Area. There are 177 tanks at Hanford, which hold a combined total of about 56 million gallons of waste.
The latest WRPS figures regarding the costs of added worker protection come from a Nov. 22 estimate the company prepared for DOE, and which the agency forwarded to the Washington state Ecology Department on Dec. 2. Ecology posted the letter online Wednesday.
The potential slow-down at the tank farms could have site-wide ramifications at Hanford. As part of the same consent order that prescribes “empty-by” dates for A, AX and C tanks, DOE faces a 2036 legal deadline to start turning all Hanford’s liquid waste into more easily storable radioactive glass.
The agency wants to get a head start on that work — which will be done at the Waste Treatment Plant Bechtel National is building — by solidifying less-viscous, less-radioactive material known as low-activity waste starting in 2022.
However, if the union has its way and DOE mandates use of supplied air within 200 feet of the tank farms, WRPS will not be able to feed tank waste from the tank farms to the Waste Treatment Plant until 2028, according to the contractor’s November analysis.
To ensure the tank farm can pipe low-activity waste to the Waste Treatment Plant without letting high-level waste slip through, WRPS is building a Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System to sort the more briny low-activity waste from sludgier, high-level tank waste.
The silver lining, WRPS wrote, is that no matter how slow tank farm work gets, it should not affect construction of the Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System.
WRPS workers have reported falling ill after possible exposure to toxic vapors leaking from Hanford’s tanks. A lawsuit filed last year by the union and Hanford Challenge sought increased worker protections at the site. Washington state has also joined the lawsuit. Trial is scheduled for Oct. 30, 2017.
While breathing gear protects workers in close proximity to the tanks, it also makes working on the tanks more difficult — and therefore more costly. Workers can log 5.75 hours on the job a day without gear, compared with 3.25 hours daily with the gear, WRPS wrote in its latest analysis of the labor dangers at the site. Besides the time it takes to take the gear on and off, workers have to replace their air tanks periodically throughout the day.
DOE and its contractor are draining more leak prone single-shelled tanks and putting the waste inside into sturdier and newer double-shelled tanks, which have sprung far fewer leaks. One of the double-shelled tanks is slated to be the reservoir that feeds waste into the Waste Treatment Plant.
WRPS is exploring at least one alternative to worker-worn breathing gear: chemical-scrubbing cartridges that can be placed inside some Hanford tanks to treat vapors at the source.
As of Nov. 22 letter, WRPS could not say whether the cartridges would be cheaper than the breathing gear now in use. In a back-of-the-napkin style assumption, The contractor said cartridges would give workers an extra hour on the job each day, compared with breathing gear.
A third party WRPS did not identify is evaluating cartridge performance and is expected to complete its work by Feb. 2, the company said.
Editor’s Note: 12/13/2016, 2:51 p.m. Eastern: A quote in this story that should have been attributed to Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge, is now correctly attributed to Tom Carpenter.
