Staff Reports
WC Monitor
7/24/2015
The federal judge hearing the Hanford consent decree case will appoint an expert panel to help her sort through technical issues on the legal battle pitting the state of Washington against the Department of Energy.
After hearing arguments Thursday in Eastern Washington District U.S. Court, Judge Rosanna Malouf Peterson said she would issue a written ruling on the matter. The parties can expect her ruling to set milestones more in line with what the state of Washington has proposed for the Hanford cleanup than what the Department of Energy has offered, she said. DOE has proposed waiting to set deadlines until technical issues are resolved and a new baseline is established to make sure the deadlines are realistic and achievable. The state has argued for about 100 milestones to be set now to hold DOE accountable.
To prepare for the hearing the judge looked through more than 6,000 pages of documents, she said. The three-member expert panel she plans to appoint will help her with the scientific information they contain. She gave DOE and the state 21 days to each select an expert for the new body. If they can agree on a third expert, the court will consider their recommendation. Before the hearing she told the parties that she initially wants to consider whether their proposed amendments to the 2010 court-enforced consent decree that set deadlines for specific cleanup operations are suitably tailored to accomplish the goals of the consent decree rather than considering specific deadlines for work to be completed. Proposals differ on how and when deadlines should be set, treatment of high-level waste before the Waste Treatment Pllant’s Pretreatment Facility is operating, building more double-shell tanks, and adding more reporting requirements for DOE.
The state wants DOE to be required to build four 1-million-gallon double-shell tanks to provide adequate space to meet consent decree requirements for retrieving waste from 19 single-shell tanks, including the last 10 C Farm tanks and then nine more of DOE’s choosing. Building new tanks falls outside of the consent decree, said U.S. Department of Justice attorney David Kaplan. The tanks could not be built by 2022, when the consent decree now requires the last of the 19 tanks to be emptied, he said. “Building the tanks would be significantly burdensome, extremely expensive and likely counterproductive,” according to Kaplan. The cost could reach $600 million for all four, he said. The state then could require eight more tanks to be built.
Money for the tanks likely would come at the expense of other Hanford work or other work in the DOE complex, he said. The department believes that operating the 242-A Evaporator to reduce the liquid waste in double-shell tanks will free up enough space in those tanks to hold waste from the single-shell tanks covered in the consent decree. DOE has upgraded the evaporation facility in recent years. However, the state believes that with the closing of double-shell Tank AY-102, which has a leak between its shells, DOE will not have enough storage to complete retrieval of the 19 tanks in the consent decree. The federal agency is banking on unprecedented efficiency of the evaporation facility, said Andrew Fitz, lead attorney for the state.
The Department of Energy is proposing 23 evaporation runs over seven years even though in the last five years it has conducted just three evaporation campaigns, with only one starting on time, Fitz said. If the evaporation campaign runs on the low end of the projected efficiency rate, 50 evaporation campaigns could be needed in seven years to free up enough storage space, he said. Malouf Peterson said the expert panel she plans to appoint will provide information on topics such as the likely efficiency of evaporator operations.
Department of Justice attorneys said a state proposal to require DOE to prepare for direct feed of high-level waste also falls outside the scope of the consent decree. DOE has raised the possibility of preparing some waste to be sent directly to the Waste Treatment Plant’s high-level waste facility, bypassing the plant’s pretreatment facility, where construction is stopped until technical issues are resolved. That would require a new facility, the Tank Waste Characterization and Staging Facility, to be built outside the Waste Treatment Plant. DOE is concerned that the project could cost $500 million and that new technical issues could be created that would further slow waste treatment, Kaplan said.
The project is more complicated than a proposal that both the state and DOE agree upon to build a facility that would allow low-activity waste to be fed directly to the plant’s Low Activity Waste Facility. The state argued that the direct feed high-level waste project falls within the consent decree because the current deadline in the decree calls for full operation of the Waste Treatment Plant by 2022, including both high-level and low-activity waste treatment. Under the most optimistic scenario being proposed now, only low-activity waste might be treated starting in 2022. It makes sense to start work now toward direct feed high-level waste and later remove the requirement if the project proves unworkable, the state said.
