Bechtel National defended its progress on construction of the crucial Waste Treatment Plant at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state following a Tuesday Twitter strike from a local nuclear watchdog.
The sharply critical Hanford Challenge on Tuesday chided Bechtel for earning a “failing grade” on its work on the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) in the 2016 government budget year that ended Sept. 30. The group cited a document posted online by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management that showed the company earned only 44 percent of the $21 million award fee it could have received in fiscal 2016.
That $9 million take includes an $8 million award DOE disclosed in April for good program management and cost-control at WTP, plus another $1 million awarded subsequently to Bechtel for designing a WTP modification that could allow the plant to partially start up by 2022.
While Bechtel acknowledged this week that its $9 million take does indeed represent all the WTP-related fees the company earned from DOE in the 2016 fiscal year, the company also contends that Hanford Challenge’s barbed tweets gloss over contractual complexities that effectively pillory the longtime cleanup contractor for following orders from its customer.
In 2012, following safety and technical concerns raised by a whistleblower for a WTP subcontractor, DOE ordered Bechtel to stop work on parts of the plant designed to treat Hanford’s sludgy, high-level waste: the most radioactive liquid in the site’s underground tanks. Bechtel complied, but DOE didn’t update the company’s WTP contract to modify or remove the construction and management milestones tied to this work.
As a result, more than half the total fee Bechtel could have earned in fiscal 2016 had DOE not halted high-level waste work — some $11.5 million — was effectively impossible for the company to earn. That shows up as an apparent whiff in the final accounting.
In addition, DOE does not tabulate Bechtel’s annual fees for good performance management at WTP until Dec. 31. That means any good behavior in the first nine months of fiscal 2016 was unaccounted for in the DOE document Hanford Challenged shared Tuesday on Twitter, Bechtel spokesman Fred deSousa wrote in a Wednesday email.
Bechtel National is building the Waste Treatment Plant under a contract awarded in 2000 and now worth about $11.5 billion. The Waste Treatment Plant eventually will solidify more than 55 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste left over from Cold War plutonium production for the Pentagon’s nuclear arsenal.
While treatment of sludgy high-level waste now is not expected to begin until 2036, Bechtel and DOE plan to start treating Hanford’s less-radioactive, low-activity waste at WTP by 2022 using an approach dubbed Direct Feed Low-Activity Waste treatment.
Whether that date is realistic depends on if the company and its customer can reach an agreement on a WTP contract modification that has been under negotiation for more than two years now.
Expected to be finalized by Dec. 31, the modification Bechtel National is waiting on would pave the way to start solidifying low-activity waste years before the high-level waste facility switches on. Prior to the 2012 work pauses at the high-level waste facility, DOE and Bechtel planned to start both high-level and low-activity waste treatment around 2020.
This summer, Bechtel said it expected to complete design work for the Direct Feed Low-Activity Waste approach by May 31, 2017. The approach requires one notable construction project: an Effluent Management Facility that will treat very slightly radioactive water left over from solidification of low-activity waste. The building should be mostly constructed by May 2018.
On possible complication looms for low-activity waste treatment: a pretreatment facility slated to be built by Hanford tank farms contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) may not be ready to switch on in time to sort briny, low-activity waste from sludgy high-level waste for WTP by 2022.
Hanford Challenge and the union representing WRPS workers, who are transferring waste from some of Hanford’s leakiest underground tanks to sturdier vessels, have sued the company in federal court. They are demanding enhanced worker protections, including increased use of supplied air for protection against noxious vapors that sometimes leak from the massive, underground containers.
WRPS says that demand would slow down work so much that a Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System could not come online until 2028.
Hanford Challenge also took a shot at WRPS last week, goading the company for earning about 37 percent of its possible fiscal 2016 award fee of $38 million. WRPS’ $6-billion tank farm operations contract runs through Sept. 30, 2018. The company, led by AECOM, did not immediately reply to a request for comment this week.
