Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
1/31/2014
With the recent approval of nearly $100 million in contract modifications, site officials say West Valley Demonstration Project cleanup contractor CH2M Hill B&W West Valley, LLC, is on the right track. After experiencing numerous struggles in its first year after taking over the contract in August 2011, last year the contractor completed its first open-air radiological facility demo, shipped half the site’s low-level legacy waste and built an interim storage pad. “We’ve got the foundations of very good plan right now,” CHBWV President and General Manager Dan Coyne told WC Monitor this week. “There are a number of things that could impact that good plan, like funding, that are beyond our control somewhat. But we’ve got a good plan, further improving our working schedules, and we’ve got a very good team here. Things have settled out from a year and a half ago.”
CHBWV is undertaking a major D&D project at the western New York former reprocessing facility with plans to take down the main plant before its contract ends in April 2019. The contractor faced issues in its first year, including the early departure of its general manager, project management concerns and issues getting its baseline approved. However, in 2013 the CHBWV made progress on numerous projects and in November implemented significant contract changes. “Recently we did a contract modification to address a number of material differences and that increased the contract value by about $90 million,” Department of Energy West Valley Director Bryan Bower told WC Monitor last week. “A lot of that was associated with some material differences relative to the main plant. Obviously that is going to change some dates.”
Baseline ‘Replan’ to Improve Project Management
The “replanning” of the baseline should allow for better project management overall, Coyne said. “We don’t have a proposal baseline, now we have a baseline with the bulk of the material differences put into the baseline and that allows us to have better alignment vertically between our day to day schedules and our baseline. That was our challenge,” Coyne said. “There are things that we struggled with, don’t get me wrong. … But now that we have got a baseline that’s mostly workable, it’s going to allow us to further improve project management. Our previous baseline was primarily from the proposal. So you’ve done over $100 million of change as a result of material differences. So our contract was for $330 million and now you’re up in the $450s. We’re better aligned.”
Those material differences have to deal with both waste that needed to be repackaged because it didn’t meet acceptance criteria, as well as D&D work. “There were some cells that didn’t match the starting conditions that were in the RFP. DOE acknowledged it. There was no contentiousness on these material differences and getting them accepted, we just had to come up with the proposal,” Coyne said.
DOE: CHBWV Had ‘Quite a Very Good’ 2013
The Department says that there was a lot of progress at the site in 2013. “They’ve actually had quite a very good calendar year 2013. We got a lot accomplished this year,” Bower said. Among the accomplishments is the construction of an on-site high-level waste storage pad, which will hold the roughly 275 vitrified waste canisters that must be removed from the main plant before D&D can begin. The pad, completed in November, will hold 56 vertical storage casks that can each contain five canisters. “That was a very intensive effort,” Bower said. “It’s a pad that’s about 150 feet by 100 feet, 3 foot thick. It had to be done in two placements, so over 90 trucks coming in within a one-day period of time. Basically every three to six minutes we had another truck rolling through the gate. All done in those two lifts, not an injury, not an event, it was very well coordinated in getting the pad in. In front of pad there us an even larger apron, not quite as thick, but actually a larger apron where the cask transporter will maneuver to get the casks put in place.”
First Open-Air Demo Completed
And in a smaller trial run of the main plant demolition, CHBWV successfully completed D&D of the 01-14 building last year, which was the first radiological facility torn down in New York since the 2010 contamination incident at the Separations Process Research Unit. “It was definitely a proof of principle. We wanted to prove that open-air demo can be done safely with no release and we did it,” Coyne said. He added, “We proposed that we were going to do this building first, we were going to go at it very methodically, and that helps build trust with the regulators. The main plant is obviously going to be very complex. This building had three cells, and the cells were not as contaminated as the cells in the main plant. All it does is it proves that we can do open-air demo and do it safely and remove equipment.”
The contractor and DOE also engaged the regulators early in the process in quarterly regulator roundtables, including New York state officials, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Coyne explained how the demolition proceeded. “We spent a year deactivating the building, going in and fixing contamination, removing the components that we could and then we demolished the building and pulled some components out while we were demolishing. That went very well,” he said. “We set up a very robust regulatory program where we had air monitors on the machine operator, we had an inner perimeter and then we installed 16 ambient air stations basically in a circle around the site.”
More than Half of Legacy Waste Shipped
Additionally, CHBWV has completed about 53 percent of its low-level legacy waste shipments, sending 70,834 cubic feet in 71 shipments. Its legacy mixed low-level waste shipments are 90 percent complete, or 4,992 cubic feet in 9 shipments, while industrial and hazardous waste shipments are now complete. “We have a milestone to ship all the legacy waste that was here at the start of the contract, and they were several thousand containers of legacy waste. So ship all that we can ship and store what we can’t ship,” Coyne said. He added, “We did a number of repacks. Putting people into cells, enclosures to go and repackage legacy low-level waste.”
Looking ahead to 2014 and beyond, the funding in the omnibus appropriations bill passed in January will allow for more work to get done, according to Coyne. The bill provides $64 million in Fiscal Year 2014, matching DOE’s budget request, and allowing CHBWV to hire more workers. “We are actually adding people back now that we have our funding level and we are in the process of doing that now. Those people are going to ship legacy waste, ship new gen waste and also deactivate the building,” he said. It will also allow CHBWV in the coming months to ship a large melter and other large components off site earlier than planned. “We weren’t going to ship it until 2017/2018, that time period, but it allows us to make the progress and get rid of that,” he said.
Focus Turning to Main Plant
This year the contractor is going to focus on deactivation of the main plant in order to prepare it for canister relocation starting around 2015 or 2016 and demolition work starting around 2017 or 2018. In 2013 CHBWV deactivated steam lines there, removed asbestos, replaced the heating system and deactivated some hot cells. Coyne said this year that the contractor will focus on shipping legacy waste, deactivation and procurements for components to support cleaning out the building. “We are working on the vitrification facility now, cleaning out the cells, we’ve made a lot of progress on cleaning out the cell and just deactivating it, cutting it up in bite-size chunks and deactivating it one section of the building at a time,” he said.
And though CHBWV earned about 46 percent of its total available award fee in Fiscal Year 2013, Coyne noted that number is better than previous evaluations—the contractor only earned one-sixth of its available fee the first year on the job—and that CHBWV will keep improving. “We got a considerable amount more fee in the last award fee than we have in the past. We have a client with high expectations and we acknowledge their high expectations and we have high expectations of ourselves,” Coyne said. “We acknowledge that there are areas we need to improve and we are constantly partnering with the Department of Energy to talk about areas where they think we can improve.”
