A facility designed to process 56 million gallons of radioactive liquid waste stored near Richland, Wash., is going to cost far more than the $12.3 billion the Energy Department thought, DOE’s top nuclear cleanup official said Tuesday in a House budget hearing.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio) prodded the news out of Monica Regalbuto, DOE’s assistant secretary for environmental management, during a hearing of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee.
Late into the nearly two-hour session, Kaptur asked Regalbuto for an updated cost estimate for the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) that San Francisco-based Bechtel National is building for DOE at the Hanford Site former plutonium production facility. Regalbuto repeated the 10-year-old estimate of $12.3 billion.
“Do you expect it to go up?” Kaptur asked.
“Yes,” Regalbuto said.
“A lot?” Kaptur asked.
“Yes,” Regalbuto said.
The exact amount of the increase will not be known until later this year, when DOE will update its cost and schedule estimate for WTP in a process known as rebaselining. The department will release the new baseline “once we finish the negotiations with the contractor, which will be very, very soon,” Regalbuto said.
Those negotiations to which Regalbuto referred cover only the parts of WTP needed to begin treating low-level Hanford waste by 2022 using the so-called direct feed low-activity waste method. These include WTP’s long-planned low-activity waste facility; the Analytical Laboratory that will inspect pre- and post-treatment waste samples to ensure the material going into the plant turns into the material DOE intends to come out of the plant; and miscellaneous support infrastructure such as utility buildings known in Bechtel’s contract as the Balance of Facilities.
It was not clear Tuesday if the new baseline Regalbuto said DOE is developing will include estimates for the rest of WTP, including the Pretreatment Facility to sort low-level waste from more contaminated high-level waste, and the High-Level Waste Vitrification Facility itself, which a federal judge said Friday must open by 2036.
Multiple DOE officials would not permit Weapons Complex Morning Briefing to question Regalbuto after the hearing, and lawmakers did not press the DOE lifer on the point.
