Liquid waste cleanup at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state would see relatively stable funding under the fiscal 2017 budget released Tuesday, while funding for other cleanup in the central region of the nearly 600-square-mile site would tumble by nearly 20 percent.
For the Office of River Protection (ORP), which focuses on projects including the site’s waste tank farms and construction of the Waste Treatment Plant, the White House proposed nearly $1.5 billion, or a boost of about 5 percent above the 2016 appropriation.
In good, if not unexpected, news for Bechtel National, most of that would go to the so-called vitrification plant the San Francisco-based company is building for DOE under a contract awarded in 2000 and now worth some $9.4 billion. The plant will eventually turn 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste stored in tanks into solid glass that allows for easier and safer storage.
For construction of the Low-Activity Waste Facility, the first part of the vitrification plant planned to come online, the White House proposed some $763 million in fiscal 2017, just over 0.25 percent below the 2016 appropriation.
According to the Obama administration, funding levels just proposed for 2017 and subsequent years is sufficient to start low-activity waste treatment in 2022 – the year the whole vitrification facility was supposed to come online. DOE and Washington state are in court over when the rest of the plant would open and start treating the site’s high-level liquid waste. DOE wants to start that work in 2039, the state in 2034.
Although some work can begin without one, Bechtel still needs a contract modification from DOE to finish construction of the redesigned Low-Activity Waste Facility. The plant was originally designed to treat high- and low-level waste in tandem. DOE and Bechtel agreed in 2014 to explore a redesign, but the agency has yet to finalize the contract modification that makes the redesign official.
A Bechtel spokesperson said in a Feb. 11 email the 2017 budget proposal “will allow us to execute the [Waste Treatment Plant] scope of work for FY17, which includes continuing construction on the Low‐Activity Waste Facility, Balance of Facilities, and Analytical Laboratory to support the Direct Feed Low Activity Waste Approach. The request also allows for continued work on making technical decisions related to the Pretreatment Facility and, to a lesser degree, the High-Level Waste Facility.”
Also within the ORP proposal is good news for DOE’s other liquid waste contractor at Hanford, Washington River Protection Solutions. The company manages the leaky tanks where the liquid waste the vitrification plant will treat is now stored would under a tank operations contract DOE awarded in 2008 and that is worth up to $7 billion through 2018, including a pair of options valued north of $2 billion.
Tank farm activities would get better than an 11% boost, to about $720 million, under the 2017 budget proposal.
Washington River Protection Solutions comprises AECOM, of Bethesda, Md., and EnergySolutions of Salt Lake City. AREVA North America, the U.S. arm of the French power company, is the prime subcontractor on the job.
Meanwhile, funding for other cleanup at Hanford, which is managed by DOE’s Richland Operations Office, would drop off by roughly $190 million from the current budget under the White House’s 2017 budget request; the office would get $800 million in 2017, down from more than $990 million in 2016. Those figures include some non-defense cleanup spending. Including only the defense-related cleanup, the Richland Operations Office funding would drop by about 22-percent year over year, to roughly $716 million.
Budget documents show just over $88 million of the $190 million drop detailed in the request is due to work being finished, or long-lead purchases coming in as expected at the site.
For example, the River Corridor Closure Project managed by the Richland office is nearly complete, resulting in some $23 million in work that no longer needs to be done at the site, according to the 2017 request. That work focused on more than 750 solid and liquid waste sites close by the Columbia River shoreline.
Another $65 million spent in 2016 but not needed in 2017 was for containers that will eventually hold highly radioactive sludge from Hanford’s K-West Basin, according to the request.
A DOE spokesperson on Thursday declined to specifically identify the balance of the proposed cuts for Hanford, and deferred to the roughly 500-page Environmental Management 2017 budget request released on Tuesday.
Elsewhere at Hanford, it is not clear whether the long-awaited Hanford sludge cleanup will begin in 2018, as expected. About 35 cubic yards of sludge are stored in underwater containers in the K-West Basin about 400 yards from the Columbia River. DOE blew a 2014 deadline to start sludge cleanup there and now looks to be cutting it close to begin construction by 2018, the new start date the department settled on with the state last year.
DOE is working on new cost and schedule estimates for the project, which is managed by the Richland Operations Office. In 2014, the department thought would cost just shy of $310 million to complete the facility, with construction beginning by fall of 2018, according to the 2017 request.
To calculate a new baseline, DOE will commission an external independent review for the sludge removal project, which will happen sometime in 2016, the request says. DOE will have to vet the report before it is sent to Congress. The department did not say in the request when that might happen.
In a Wednesday hearing of the Senate Finance Committee, Washington’s junior senator took Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to task for the White House’s proposed cuts to Hanford. “It’s very important that we don’t miss cleanup deadlines and that we make sure that technically difficult aspects of this project are met,” Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said in the hearing.
“I know that everybody always looks at the budget and thinks there’s ways to get money, big numbers, and they look at cleanup. But this is the largest cleanup project in the world and it has taken a long time and needs to happen, and we need to have the continued support,” Cantwell said.
Lew, a former director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said he would respond to the question after the hearing.
