Design changes intended to prevent an explosion at the High-Level Waste Facility under construction as part of the Waste Treatment Plant at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., were both adequate and properly vetted, according to an agency report made public on June 3.
“These issues involved concerns about RLD [Radioactive Liquid Waste Disposal] system reliability and potential hydrogen explosion hazards,” DOE’s Office of Enterprise Assessments (EA) stated in the report. The new design, “if properly implemented, can resolve the potential hydrogen explosion issue associated with the RLD system,” according to the assessment.
In official lingo, EA looked at whether changes construction and operations contractor Bechtel National proposed in 2014 — and which DOE approved in March — to the site’s Waste Treatment Plant’s preliminary documented safety analysis (PDSA) change package for the redesign of the High-Level Waste Facility radioactive liquid waste disposal system were appropriate.
Then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu put construction of the High-Level Waste Facility on hold in 2012. The latest EA report — based on site visits conducted in late 2014 and subsequent back-and-forth between DOE and Bechtel that carried into this year — marks a step toward lifting that pause.
In a Thursday email, a DOE spokesperson at Hanford’s Office of River Protection said “DOE anticipates authorizing full procurement and construction of the HLW Facility in the FY17 timeframe.”
The spokesperson also identified four major milestones Bechtel must complete for that to happen:
- Development and DOE approval of the HLW facility PDSA update.
- Completion of design studies to resolve comments from DOE’s design and operability review.
- Implementation of corrective actions from the Priority Level 1 findings.
- Implementation of the Systems Engineering Program.
The same month DOE approved Bechtel’s proposal, a federal judge in Washington state ruled the agency must have the entire Waste Treatment Plant online by 2036 — some 17 years later than the start date DOE envisioned in 2010, by which time Bechtel had been on the job for 10 years. The plant will turn millions of gallons of chemical and radioactive waste into more easily storable radioactive glass.
DOE and Bechtel National still want the Low-Activity Waste Facility, which will treat less-dangerous liquid waste from Hanford’s 56-million-gallon tank farm, to come online by 2022. The groups are working on a rebaseline and contract modification that will allow that to happen.
As recently as March, Monica Regalbuto, DOE’s assistant secretary for environmental management, said in congressional testimony the rebaseline would be ready “very soon.”
The latest public cost estimate for WTP, $12.3 billion, is over 10 years old. The rebaseline DOE and Bechtel are working on covers only the part of the plant dealing with low-activity waste. The cost is expected to rise “a lot,” Regalbuto said in her March testimony.
6/13/16 — The story has been corrected to reflect that Bechtel has been the prime contractor on the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant since 2000, and that DOE had envisioned a 2019 start date for the plant only as recently as 2010.
