DOE: Bechtel Contract Mods for Hanford Waste Treatment Plant ‘Very Near’

The Energy Department has almost finished tweaking an $11.4-billion contract with Bechtel National that will officially clear the San Francisco-based company to modify the Hanford Site Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) to begin treating low-level nuclear waste by 2022.

Conceived more than 15 years ago to turn some 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste into a more safely storable glass form, WTP was originally supposed to come online by 2019 and treat both high- and low-level waste from the former DOE plutonium production site.

But in 2012, then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu, citing cost and technical uncertainties, halted construction on WTP’s high-level waste facility and the pretreatment facility through which both high- and low-level waste would have been piped to massive cauldrons to be mixed with molten glass.

The Department of Energy and Washington state are now in court arguing whether high-level waste treatment should be begin in 2039 or 2034 — DOE advocates the later start date — but both agree low-level waste treatment at Hanford can begin sooner.

To that end, DOE and Bechtel have been working to modify WTP to treat low-level waste separately from high-level waste in a process dubbed direct feed low-activity waste, or DFLAW. Bechtel in 2014 proposed the contract modifications it believed it needed for the work to DOE, and negotiations are now “very near completion,” William Hamel, DOE’s assistant manager for WTP, said Tuesday at the 2016 Waste Management Conference.

Including work not covered under Bechtel’s contract, DOE expects the entire WTP to cost about $12.3 billion. The price tag could change as DOE re-baselines the project to include proposed DFLAW work. Hamel said the re-baseline is in progress, but would not be more specific.

Besides the Bechtel work, Washington River Protection Solutions, which manages the tank farm that houses the waste to be treated at the WTP, is on the hook to build a new direct-feed pretreatment facility for DFLAW. Meanwhile, DFLAW is making plodding progress on another hurdle: obtaining the required construction permits from the Washington state Department of Ecology, one of three signatories to the Tri-Party Agreement that governs Hanford cleanup, along with DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency.

All told, DFLAW requires 32 state construction permits. So far, DOE and its contractors have secured two, Kevin Smith, manager of DOE’s Office of River Protection, said after the panel discussion. DOE and its contractors are in touch with the Ecology Department, Smith said, and the permits should be in place in time for Bechtel to bring low-activity waste treatment online by 2022.