The Energy Department expects this year to finalize contract modifications necessary to begin treatment of the Hanford Site’s liquid waste by 2022, according to a monthly report filed with regulators in Washington state and Oregon.
Negotiations with contractor Bechtel National “have been ongoing and are expected to be completed by the end of the calendar year,” the Energy Department stated in the November monthly report on the consent decree that governs liquid-waste cleanup at the former plutonium production site.
Those negotiations have dragged on for about two years now. Earlier this year, sources familiar with the Hanford Site thought the modifications would be done around Sept. 30, which marked the end of the federal government’s 2016 fiscal year.
Bechtel is building the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) at the site to turn roughly 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste into more easily storable glass cylinders in a process called vitrification.
When DOE awarded Bechtel National the WTP contract in 2000, the agency thought the plant would treat both voluminous, less-radioactive low-level waste and sludgier, more radioactive high-level waste at the same time. That strategy was scrapped after DOE in 2012 halted most WTP construction because of safety and technical concerns. Later, Bechtel and the agency decided to start up low-level waste treatment first, in a strategy known as Direct Feed Low-Activity Waste, by 2022. DOE must start high-activity waste treatment by 2036, a federal judge in Washington state ruled in March.
The physical modifications necessary to use WTP for only low-level waste treatment require contract modifications for Bechtel National. The company’s WTP contract is currently valued at $11.3 billion. Direct Feed Low-Activity Waste treatment will use much of the same WTP infrastructure Bechtel was originally contracted to build.
Along with the contract modification, DOE is preparing a new cost estimate for low-activity waste treatment. The agency’s latest public cost estimate for building WTP, $12.3 billion, is over 10 years old. The full cost of the Waste Treatment Plant is expected to rise “a lot,” Monica Regalbuto, DOE’s assistant secretary for environmental management, said in congressional testimony in March.
In the November report to state regulators, DOE stated only that it “will continue presentations to the Energy System Acquisition Advisory Board and the Deputy Energy Secretary on the new Baseline Change Proposal” for WTP.
