Local community leaders are urging the Washington state Department of Ecology to expedite completing an environmental impact statement (EIS) and a revised permit for Perma-Fix Northwest in Richland, Wash., near the Hanford Site.
The Department of Ecology said at a public meeting Wednesday in Richland on the scope of the EIS that the permit application and renewal process is very lengthy. But some community leaders said the state was moving too slowly, and as a result some Hanford waste is expected to be trucked across the nation to Tennessee for treatment rather than being processed and solidified at Perma-Fix in Richland.
Perma-Fix Northwest treats low-level and mixed-low-level radioactive wastes at its plant, one of several operated by Atlanta-based environmental Perma-Fix Environmental Services. It requires a Dangerous Waste Regulation permit from the state, which must to be renewed every 10 years. The current permit covering all waste operations was set to expire in 2009; Perma-Fix submitted a renewal application at that time, but it has not yet been approved by the state.
Companies are allowed to continue operating if they make a timely application for a revised permit. Perma-Fix met its 2009 deadline to do that.
Ecology rejected the initial application and applications in 2011 and 2015 as containing insufficient information to meet state regulations and departmental guidelines for reviewing the documents. From 2015 to 2018. Ecology employees met as often as weekly with Perma-Fix personnel to help them work through the permit application process, said John Price, a Department of Ecology section manager. Perma-Fix submitted a fourth revised permit application in February that is being evaluated for acceptance.
Ecology is requiring a revised EIS be done to inform conditions to be included in the revised permit, which would require a separate public input process before it is finalized by the state. The permit sets conditions that Perma-Fix must adhere to as it handles waste. The EIS is used to develop those conditions.
The state agency last completed an EIS for Perma-Fix Northwest in 1998, and expects to complete the updated document in spring 2020.
However, the U.S. Department of Energy wants the second phase of the Hanford Test Bed Initiative completed this year, and Perma-Fix and Ecology are at odds on EIS and permit conditions for treating radioactive tank waste at the former plutonium production complex.
The Test Bed Initiative is a demonstration project to chemically treat and solidify Hanford tank waste equivalent to low-level radioactive waste in a grout-like substance. After being processed, it would be shipped to Waste Control Specialists in Texas for disposal.
Supporters say the initiative could speed up treatment of Hanford tank waste at less cost than expanding the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant under construction to vitrify all 56 million gallons of Hanford tank waste. The plant was not planned to be large enough to treat the full 90 percent of the tank waste that is estimated to be separated out as low-activity waste.
A 2017 GAO report estimated that grouting low-activity radioactive waste at DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina would cost $153 per gallon of waste, while the average cost of vitrifying low activity radioactive waste at Hanford would be $1,081 per gallon.
Ecology did not require a permit for Phase 1 of the Test Bed Initiative, which treated just 3 gallons of waste. But it says the next phase, which would treat 2,000 gallons of waste, must be covered by the permit. The first step is including it in the EIS, which the state said it is willing to do if enough information is provided. But it does not want to consider permitting the Test Bed Initiative until Perma-Fix completes its current permit process, at which time it would consider another application.
However, Perma-Fix wants the revised permit to cover 3 million gallons of mixed low-level radioactive waste, which could include Hanford tank waste and waste from other DOE sites. The permit should cover everything Perma-Fix might want to do over the next decade, particularly since the permit revision is such a lengthy process, said Richard Grondin, general manager of Perma-Fix Northwest.
Perma-Fix Northwest’s current permit from the state covers mixed low-level waste treatment, which management believes covers the 2,000 gallons to be treated in Phase 2 of the Test Bed Initiative, Grondin said. But he pledged to abide by the state’s decision.
That likely will mean that the 2,000 gallons of tank waste will be trucked to Tennessee for treatment and then sent to Texas. “It’s a shame we have to go all the way to Tennessee when technically we have the permit to do it in Richland,” Grondin said at the meeting. He offered to give tours of the Perma-Fix plant. “You will see our facility is safe. It is sound. We have a strong radiation protection program,” he said.
Richland Mayor Bob Thompson said it makes more sense to treat and grout the waste in Richland rather than sending it to Tennessee. Energy Department site managers and contractor presidents have told him they are frustrated with the delay in the work needed to update the EIS and the permit, Thompson said in a letter to Ecology read into the record at the meeting. “It is frustrating to me that a company, located in our city, is being hampered in their ability to do business by the state of Washington,” said Thompson, who also is the board chairman of Hanford Communities, a coalition of local governments.
Two Richland community and civic leaders, Bob Ferguson and Gary Petersen, submitted a joint letter saying, “We believe there are no safety reasons, nor regulatory requirements that should stop the Department of Ecology from granting this permit.” It is difficult to understand how any regulatory permit could take more than 10 years, they said. Ferguson and Petersen wrote that they believe the recent weekly meetings between Ecology and Perma-Fix on the permit were needed because of “Ecology’s ever-changing requirements for the permit application.”
Delaying issuing the updated permit adds major cost increases to Hanford cleanup, they said. “Because of this, Ecology should itself be held accountable for these additional costs, whether by congressional action or by lawsuit,” they said.
The Tri-City Development Council is concerned about the escalating estimates of environmental remediation at Hanford, said David Reeploeg, vice president for federal programs. The most recent Hanford Lifecycle, Scope, Schedule, and Cost Report, released in January, put the remaining Hanford costs at $323 billion through 2079 to $677 billion through 2102. New ideas like the Test Bed Initiative to cut cleanup costs and speed work should be met with a positive and open attitude, Reeploeg said.
