Weapons Complex Monitor took a break over the past two weeks for Congress’ annual summer recess. Our affiliate publication, Weapons Complex Morning Briefing, kept up on the latest news around the nuclear security enterprise and its industry partners. Here’s a recap of what happened while we were out.
WIPP Contractor Gets New Leadership
The contractor that manages the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico will have new leadership starting next month.
Sean Dunagan will succeed Bruce Covert as president and project manager for AECOM-led Nuclear Waste Partnership (NWP), according to an announcement Aug 13. He began with a two-week transition alongside Covert starting Aug. 29. Covert’s last day is Sept. 13, according to NWP spokesman Donavan Mager.
Mager said he could not discuss details of the selection process. “This is company proprietary information, so we cannot discuss the hiring process,” he wrote in an Aug. 13 email.
Dunagan already has an extensive history with WIPP, the underground disposal facility for the Energy Department’s transuranic waste. He served as senior recovery manager from December 2014 to April 2017, following the February 2014 radiation release that closed the site to waste emplacement for nearly three years, according to Dunagan’s LinkedIn profile. That included an 11-month stint as acting deputy manager, from February to December 2016.
Dunagan was most recently a manager for research and development, science, and engineering in special projects and remote site support the Sandia National Laboratories’ Carlsbad location.
“In this capacity, he led the team working on development of the WIPP 3D Performance Assessment effort, which will enable long-term regulatory success,” according to the press release. “Other responsibilities included ensuring regulatory compliance with 40 CFR 191 and 194 and supervision and responsibility for all facility management activities for SNL-C’s remote site in Carlsbad. Additionally, this included responsibility for strategic planning and budgeting of the long-term plan for all Sandia-WIPP activities.”
Covert will assume a “senior leadership position” at AECOM after more than two years in charge of Nuclear Waste Partnership, the release says. Details are still being finalized, Mager wrote.
Nuclear Waste Partnership, in which AECOM partners with BWX Technologies, has a potential 10-year, $2 billion contract to operate WIPP through September 2022. That would require DOE to approve a second option period by the end of September 2020.
This is second big management change around the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant this summer. On June 17, Todd Shrader, manager of DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, officially became the principal deputy assistant secretary (PDAS) in the Office of Environmental Management in Washington, D.C. Shrader’s deputy at the Carlsbad Field Office, Kirk Lachman, now serves as acting manager.
Colorado Studies High Plutonium Level in Soil Sample Near Rocky Flats
A soil sample with elevated levels of plutonium discovered in the vicinity of the former Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility near Denver has drawn attention from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment.
The Jefferson Parkway Public Highway Authority on Aug. 16 informed the health department of the sample taken on the parkway’s right-of-way near Indiana Street within the former Rocky Flats buffer zone, now part of a federal wildlife refuge. The samples were taken prior to the 2020 start of construction for the Jefferson Parkway, a privately funded, publicly owned regional toll road to serve Metro Denver and northern Colorado.
Tests on the sample turned up a plutonium level of 264 pCi/g, or picocuries per gram, which is well above the 50 pCi/g cleanup standard to protect public health, said Jennifer Opila, director of the Hazardous Materials and Waste Management Division within the state Department of Public Health and Environment.
In an open letter to the community Aug. 20, Opila said more sampling and analysis are needed to understand if the finding is a sign of wider contamination or an isolated instance.
“We are taking the sample result seriously because it is much higher than previous samples in the vicinity and higher than the cleanup standard,” Opila stated. The Parkway Authority will do more detailed testing in the vicinity where the single sample was taken.
The state health agency contacted the U.S. Department of Energy and Environmental Protection Agency regarding the finding.
The Denver Post reported news of the elevated sample Aug. 20.
The Rocky Flats weapons plant made plutonium pits, or triggers, for nuclear weapons until it closed in 1992. The Energy Department certified in December 2005 that remediation of Rocky Flats was complete. Much of the old weapons property now comprises the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge.
Advocacy groups went to court earlier this year to gain access to documents that might provide evidence of residual plutonium contamination and other ongoing environmental risks on the property. Rocky Flats Downwinders and other organizations contend the Energy Department prematurely declared the facility cleaned up. The site is monitored by DOE’s Office of Legacy Management.
DNFSB Closes Hanford Waste Treatment Plant Safety Recommendation
The U.S. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) has officially closed an 8-year-old recommendation that identified significant failings in the safety culture for the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) being built at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
“The Board has concluded that the Department of Energy has adequately addressed the underlying causes associated with the Board’s concerns. Therefore, the Board closes Recommendation 2011-1,” DNFSB Chairman Bruce Hamilton wrote in a July 30 letter to Energy Secretary Rick Perry.
Bechtel National in 2001 began building the vitrification plant that will convert much of Hanford’s 56 million gallons of radioactive waste into a glass form for permanent disposal. Processing of low-activity waste is scheduled to begin by 2023, followed by treatment of high-level waste by 2036.
In the original June 2011 finding, the board determined that the “prevailing safety culture at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant is flawed and effectively defeats” a 1991 secretary of energy notice on nuclear safety policy.
The board cited two specific findings at the time: there was a “chilled atmosphere” that undermined the project’s safety culture, including management behaviors that “discouraged timely and effective resolution of safety issues”; and that both Bechtel and DOE’s Office of River Protection (ORP), which oversees the project, failed to deal with those issues, with personnel worried that speaking up could lead to retribution.
There have been a number of whistleblower lawsuits brought at WTP. Just this month, Bechtel settled a July 2018 lawsuit brought by plaintiff Curtis W. Hall II, who claims he was effectively fired for raising nuclear safety concerns.
The Energy Department by 2015 had carried out a series of corrective measures to resolve the issues, including ORP forming the employee-driven Organizational and Safety Culture Improvement Council and the management-monitoring Organizational Safety Culture Advisory Group. The DOE office also established a new position of safety culture adviser. An employee concern program, covering both DOE offices at Hanford and all site contractors, was also initiated.
Similarly, Bechtel also established a nuclear safety and quality culture program and assigned specific safety culture responsibilities to particular jobs at the Waste Treatment Plant, among other steps, the DNFSB said.
However, DNFSB staff identified four areas where work remains to ensure the safety culture improvements continue, according to its report. These include management engagement by Bechtel National and improved surveys of safety culture issues by DOE and its contractor.
Bechtel, DOE Take Another Step Toward Finishing Hanford Vit Plant
The U.S. Energy Department and contractor Bechtel National reached a key milestone this month toward operation of the $17 billion Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The company and DOE’s Office of River Protection held a ribbon-cutting ceremony Aug. 19 to mark the start of testing on equipment within an annex connected to a facility where low-activity nuclear waste from Hanford’s underground tanks will be converted into a stable glass form for storage and disposal.
Among other things, the 20,000-square-foot, two-story annex houses the control room for the Low-Activity Waste Facility, Bechtel and the Energy Department said in an Aug. 19 press release.
“The control room is the operations center of the Low-Activity Waste Facility,” said Brian Vance, DOE Hanford Site manager, in the press release. “By moving into the annex, we have the capability to monitor and control completed systems inside the 14 support buildings called the Balance of Facilities.” The control room is also used for startup and testing for the Low-Activity Waste Facility and Analytical Laboratory.
Bechtel and DOE are under a federal court order to start turning low-activity waste from some of Hanford’s 177 underground tanks into glass by 2023. The tanks hold 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste left over from decades of plutonium production.
“We are getting closer to making low-activity waste glass,” Valerie McCain, Bechtel’s project director for the WTP, said in the release. “It also allows the commissioning team to be in a single, central location for daily work activities.”
Seventy-two of the Low-Activity Waste Facility’s 92 systems are already being tested to confirm they are complete and in safe working order. Some of the key areas include the vitrification process, mechanical handling, utility, and air supply systems. After the startup phase, systems undergo commissioning to ensure they are ready to support WTP operations by 2023.
Construction is largely complete for the Low-Activity Waste Facility, the Analytical Laboratory, and support buildings, according to DOE and Bechtel.
There are currently 120 workers employed at the annex, with 200 expected to work there during the full commissioning phase for the plant, according to Bechtel.
Savannah River Ends Interim Salt Waste Processing, Prepares for SWPF Startup
Interim salt waste treatment at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina has been shut down, as the Department of Energy prepares to start up the larger-scale Salt Waste Processing Facility (SWPF) in December.
Since April 2017, workers at the 310-square-mile site have been operating the Actinide Removal Process (ARP) and Modular Caustic Side Solvent Extraction Unit (MCU): two demonstrations that have operated jointly to process radioactive liquid salt waste. The combined demonstration removes radioactive isotopes, cesium, strontium, and actinides from the salt waste and sends them to a separate processing facility where they are processed with sludge waste. Meanwhile, ARP/MCU sends the decontaminated salt waste to the Saltstone Disposal Facility for permanent on-site storage.
In its 11-year tenure, the system processed 7.4 million gallons of salt waste, which has translated to 1,827 canisters of treated material and the operational closure of six of the site’s 51 underground waste storage tanks.
“For more than a decade, this demonstration project has proved invaluable for the operation of SWPF and allowed for the uninterrupted operation of the liquid waste mission,” SRS Manager Michael Budney said in a press release.
The Savannah River Site liquid waste mission covers processing of more than 35 million gallons of radioactive waste generated by Cold War nuclear-weapon operations, along with closure of the storage tanks and decommissioning of related facilities and equipment. About 90 percent of that waste volume is salt waste and the rest is sludge, which is treated using the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF). All told, the liquid waste mission is expected to last until 2039 with a lifecycle cost of $33 billion to $57 billion.
With the pilot process now shut down, waste transfers lines are being rerouted to the 140,000-square-foot Salt Waste Processing Facility, a $2.3 billion structure that should increase waste processing from 1.5 million gallons a year to 6 million.
