A 60-day public comment period opened Monday on Bechtel National’s plan to start installing pipes needed to clean up the Hanford Site’s low-activity liquid radioactive waste, according to regulatory filings made public yesterday.
If granted, the modification to the company’s permit with Washington state would allow Bechtel to install underground plumbing to transfer low-activity waste between Hanford’s tank farms and the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) and from the plant to the Effluent Management Facility that will handle the last step in low-activity liquid-waste cleanup.
The Waste Treatment Plant must by law open by 2023 and begin treating Hanford’s less-radioactive, low-activity waste by turning it into glass cylinders. A small amount of wastewater created by that process must be treated by the Effluent Management Facility before it can be vented into the atmosphere.
Bechtel and DOE in February sought permission to start building the Effluent Management Facility’s structure under a separate permit modification that did not include waste transfer lines.
After DOE halted construction of WTP’s high-level treatment plant in 2012 following whistleblower concerns that the facility as designed might blow up, Bechtel and its customer agreed to modify WTP so it could treat Hanford’s less-viscous, briny liquid waste before treating the site’s sludgier, more-radioactive high-level waste.
The current approach was dubbed Direct Feed Low-Activity Waste. The value of Bechtel’s contract for low-activity waste treatment alone is more than $14.5 billion, under a modification finalized last year. Including costs outside the scope of Bechtel’s contract, low-activity waste treatment will cost about $17 billion, DOE estimates.
Bechtel wants to start treating low-activity waste by 2022: a year before the legal deadline to begin the cleanup. If Bechtel cannot beat the deadline, it will forfeit about $150 million in fees. The company must start turning Hanford’s high-level waste into glass by 2036, under the consent order that governs Hanford cleanup.
