Management and disposal of radioactive waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Washington State, marred by problems for more than two decades, is the focus of a harsh new assessment by the Government Accountability Office.
?By just about any definition,? the auditing agency says, ?Hanford has not been a well-planned, well-managed or well-executed major capital construction project.?
Hanford opened in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project and operated almost continuously through 1987 as the country?s largest manufacturer of weapons-grade plutonium. Left behind at the 586-square-mile site are 56 million gallons of highly radioactive waste in aged and corroded underground storage tanks.
In 1989, the Department of Energy assumed responsibility for safely disposing of this waste, which threatens to leak into the bordering Columbia River and affect downstream industry, habitat and human health.
After attempting and abandoning three cleanup plans, the Energy Department in 2000 awarded a management contract to Bechtel National. The core of the project is a waste treatment and immobilization plant consisting of three buildings: a single pretreatment facility to sort high-radioactivity waste from the low-radioactivity kind and separate vitrification plants for each stream in which the waste will be combined with molten glass and then cooled for stable storage.
Plant operations under Bechtel were initially scheduled to begin by 2011 with total projected costs of $4.3 billion. The budget has since swollen to an estimated $13.4 billion, and the plant?s opening has been delayed until 2019. Many see this revised timeline as hopelessly, even recklessly, optimistic.
Such delays, escalating costs and daunting technical challenges ?raise troubling questions as to whether this project can be constructed and operated successfully,? the audit warns. It presents a long list of concerns about the operation, from a negligent safety culture onsite to ineffective monetary incentives for progress.
The Government Accountability Office recommended a halt to construction on the core facility until the design meets nuclear industry guidelines, a new incentive structure to avoid premature reward payments, and an investigation into potentially erroneous payments.
Reports on Hanford from the G.A.O. in 2006 and 2009 expressed many of the same concerns, a pattern that raised red flags for those involved in the audit.
Of particular concern has been the use of a ?design-build? protocol, in which construction is carried out as the design unfolds. Whereas standard nuclear guidelines call for designs to be at least 90 percent complete before breaking ground, Hanford?s construction is 55 percent complete with only 80 percent of the facility designed.
This approach has ?led to significant cost increases and schedule delays? while also threatening the plant?s ability to operate safely once completed, the report said.
Some officials involved in the project cast its unparalleled complexity rather than mismanagement as the source of the setbacks. In his resignation letter last week, the Secretary of Energy, Stephen Chu, described Hanford as ?the most complex and largest nuclear project in history.?
One problem identified in the latest audit is that over 40 years of plutonium production involving many different processes, little priority was given to keeping a detailed waste inventory. As a result, engineers now face a severe dearth of information about the waste contained in each of the 177 underground tanks ? knowledge essential to separation of the waste streams.
Nor is sampling the waste a straightforward operation. Most tanks contains many waste products that tend to separate as oil and water do, meaning that a sample from one part of a tank indicates little about its overall contents.
What is more, the pretreatment plant requires ?black cell? technologies, so called because once the plant is put into operation the high levels of radioactivity will preclude maintenance from taking place. These must operate continuously and flawlessly for up to 40 years.
Similar technologies are being installed at the Sellafield nuclear cleanup site in England, which was the subject of a similarly critical report published on Monday by the British Parliament. Sellafield has so far cost the British government $106 billion, with ?no indication of when that cost will stop rising,? according to Margaret Hodge, the chairwoman of the Committee of Public Accounts.
Yet another complication for Hanford is the shelving of the Energy Department?s plan for a geological waste repository at Yucca Mountain in the Nevada desert, where the highly radioactive waste was to have been stored. This waste must therefore remain onsite.
In light of these challenges, Dr. Chu assembled a team of eight preeminent nuclear advisers on the issue. He wrote in his resignation letter that their technical assistance over the past six months could ?avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in additional costs over the coming decades.?
But that view is not widely shared. Gary Brunson, the Energy Department?s director of engineering for the treatment plant until his own resignation last month, recommended in a memo memo to Dr. Chu in December that construction should ?be stopped to avoid further nuclear safety compromises and substantial rework.?
In an earlier memo, Mr. Brunson cited 34 actions and technical issues to argue that Bechtel ?is not competent? to follow through as the design authority at Hanford.
After reviewing a draft of the report, the Department of Energy supported many of its conclusions and provided a four-page letter detailing work either planned or under way that addresses many of the outstanding challenges.
Just last month, after a brief hiatus, construction resumed.
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