DOE TO SHUT DOWN WSCF LAB
WC Monitor
3/21/2014
The Department of Energy plans to stop operating the Waste Sampling and Characterization Facility in central Hanford within a year, it told employees this week. About 80 people work at the laboratory, including 18 employees of Mission Support Alliance and about 60 employees of its subcontractor, RJ Lee, which operates the lab. Closing the lab will reduce infrastructure costs and the savings can be used to conduct additional cleanup work at Hanford, said Matt McCormick, manager of the DOE Richland Operations Office, in a message to Hanford workers. Offsite labs can provide the same analytical services at significantly lower costs, he said. He expects an average savings of $12 million a year, most from eliminating the cost of maintaining and operating WSCF.
Mission Support Alliance is expected to have a plan prepared within 60 days for the shutdown of the 40,000-square-foot lab and the fate of about a dozen nearby buildings used for sample archiving, data management and canister cleaning. More is expected to be known then about the timing of the closure and what will happen to the workers at the lab, including at least 42 Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council (HAMTC) workers. “The work in question is ours and we intend to fight for it,” said Dave Molnaa, HAMTC president. HAMTC does not have details yet on the announced change, but it expects DOE to provide full transparency in transition discussions and to ensure that a lab contracted to perform services will use HAMTC personnel, he said. DOE has agreed to engage in labor discussions whenever privatization is proposed, he said. The Mission Support Alliance contract now includes sample analysis as assigned work, but the contract will be modified to remove that work scope.
Facility Opened in 1994
WSCF opened in 1994 to analyze samples with trace amounts of chemicals and radioactive materials from Hanford surveillance and monitoring activities and from environmental cleanup work. Among its work is looking at samples of air, water, soil, vapor and sludge. Twenty years ago DOE and its regulators were not confident that offsite labs could perform the volume of work needed and do it quickly, McCormick said. But the capacity and turnaround times of offsite labs have improved since then and shipping has become faster and more reliable, he said. Washington Closure Hanford already is using offsite labs rather WSCF, and contractors at other DOE sites also successfully ship their samples offsite, McCormick said. Washington Closure, which is responsible for river corridor cleanup, has contracts with several labs to ensure flexibility, access and quality control, said Washington Closure spokesman Peter Bengtson. The labs include TestAmerica near Hanford.
CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. is the main user of WSCF for is work to monitor groundwater and for central Hanford environmental cleanup work. Mission Support Alliance also uses the lab for samples in its surveillance and environmental monitoring work. Washington River Protection Solutions accounts for a small percentage of the lab’s work. Its samples of high level radioactive waste from Hanford tanks will continue to be sent to the 222-S Laboratory in central Hanford, which will operate as usual. When WSCF is no longer needed, it will be kept in a low-cost maintenance and surveillance mode until it is demolished. Because of its low risk to the environment, demolition is not expected to be done soon.
