The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers anticipates completing decommissioning of the reactor on the radioactively contaminated STURGIS barge by June, after which what remains of the former floating nuclear power plant will be transported for shipbreaking.
“We’re getting really close. We can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we can tell it’s not a train coming at us,” Army Corps health physicist and program manager Hans Honerlah said on March 20 during a panel discussion at the Waste Management Symposia in Phoenix, Ariz.
The STURGIS, a former World War II Liberty Ship that provided nuclear power for U.S. military and civilian purposes in the Panama Canal in the 1960s to 1970s, arrived at the Port of Galveston, Texas, in 2015 after decades in Virginia. CB&I Federal Services LLC is the contractor for decommissioning, dismantlement, and disposal of the MH-1A reactor.
Since decommissioning began, 99 percent of the radioactivity has been removed from the barge and shipped for disposal at the Waste Control Specialists facility in Andrews County, Texas. That encompasses the nuclear reactor vessel, spent fuel storage tank, canopy, and other large components. In all, nearly 1.4 million pounds of waste has been sent to Waste Control Specialists, plus 1 million gallons of wastewater shipped to a US Ecology facility in Texas.
The decommissioning contract has increased from $34.6 million to just over $66.5 million, due to two contract modifications that resulted from the project’s “complexity and challenges,” Brenda Barber, project manager at the Army Corps’ Environmental and Munitions Design Center in Baltimore, said during the panel. Barber and Honerlah cited a number of unexpected complications to the project, from losing six months of time while persuading the Galveston City Council to allow the work to proceed to having to treat the ship’s ballast water for lead contamination and ship it for disposal as hazardous waste.
The Army Corps has said it expects the full project to wrap up by summer 2019. That would leave two more reactors to be decommissioned by the Army branch: landlocked, retired plants at Fort Belvoir, Va., and Fort Greely, Alaska.
