Agreement Originally Envisioned Cleanup to be Done in 30 Years
Staff reports
WC Monitor
5/16/2014
Hanford cleanup is possibly a third complete after the Tri-Party Agreement was signed 25 years ago this week, officially starting a work plan to clean up the site in 30 years. Now officials are looking at continuing cleanup work into the 2060s, which would make it about a 75-year project. Progress as measured by dollars falls farther short of completion. A little more than $30 billion has been spent on cleanup. But the last estimate by DOE put remaining costs, which include a relatively small amount for post-cleanup oversight, at about $113 billion. When the agreement was signed the Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology didn’t know what technology could be used to clean it up, didn’t know how to do the work and didn’t know how to protect the workers who would do the work. Randy Smith, who led negotiations for EPA, has told the story of a man pointing his finger at him during a public meeting and demanding, “Can you guarantee me this site will be completely clean in 30 years?” Smith replied, “No. But it can tell you it will be a lot cleaner than it is today.”
By that gauge the first 25 years of cleanup has been successful. DOE points to removing 2,535 tons of irradiated nuclear fuel from underwater storage in the leaky K Basins near the Columbia River and putting them in dry storage in central Hanford. Eight billion gallons of contaminated groundwater have been cleaned. Workers have removed 7.5 million gallons of liquid waste from leak-prone underground tanks and 1.25 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge and saltcake waste from the tanks. Hundreds of buildings, some of them highly contaminated, have been torn down, and hundreds of waste sites with contaminated soil or debris have been dug up. “The site is much safer because of all the activities that have happened since 1989,” said Matt McCormick, manager of the DOE Richland Operations Office.
But Roy Gephart, recently retired chief environmental scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, questions how much cleanup has been done in 25 years at Hanford. “There has been significant waste management on the site,” he said. But he sees little change in the approximately 400 million curies of radioactivity as measured in waste and materials at Hanford, and little change in the approximately 400,000 tons of chemicals in Hanford tanks, soil and water. “Where are the successes in reducing risk?” he asked. “We’re not doing much active, permanent cleanup.”
Stopping Liquid Discharges Among Major Successes
Work at Hanford initially focused on the sorts of issues that kept people who understood Hanford awake at night. “There were a lot of immediate risks where things that could go very wrong, very quickly have been resolved,” said Ken Niles, Oregon Department of Energy administrator. That’s included risks like stabilizing those tanks that made the “Wyden Watch List,” named for Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, who was concerned that radioactive waste in some of Hanford’s 177 underground tanks was at risk to explode or catch fire. Moving irradiated fuel in the K Basins away from the river eliminated another immediate risk. Dennis Faulk, the EPA Hanford program manager, says one of the biggest successes of the Tri-Party Agreement was to stop the practice of discharging liquid waste, some of it with radioactive contamination, into the ground at Hanford. In 1989 as much as 22,000 gallons of contaminated water a minute was still being dumped into the ground at Hanford. It contaminated the soil and groundwater, and it raised the water table, pushing contaminated water toward the Columbia River. The agreement called for 33 of the worst discharges to be stopped in 1995 and the remainder in 1997, a deadline that was met.
Another major success was reversing a DOE proposal to leave 49 waste burial grounds near the river undisturbed and to put caps over them to prevent water intrusion that could drive contamination toward groundwater, Faulk said. DOE’s logic was that was what EPA did at landfills around the nation. “But these were not your typical landfills,” Faulk said. Most now have been dug up, and among the surprises found in them were a safe holding a container with World War II plutonium in a liquid solution and highly radioactive pieces of irradiated uranium fuel.
‘We Have a Long Way to Go’ on Groundwater
Groundwater treatment is another success that DOE and its regulators agree upon, although “We have a long way to go,” Faulk said. Some 10 billion gallons of groundwater have been treated and 98 tons of contamination removed. However, an estimated 65 to 80 square miles of contaminated groundwater will take time to clean. Some, if not most, of the needed systems are now in place. They strip chromium contamination out of groundwater near the river, preventing most of the contamination from entering the river. And in central Hanford a range of radioactive and chemical contaminants are being removed from groundwater. Every month enough water is treated to cover a football field 460 feet deep, McCormick said.
It was public pressure that made groundwater cleanup a priority at Hanford. “There was a huge public clamor to protect the Columbia River,” said John Price, Tri-Party Agreement section manager for the Washington State Department of Ecology. The public involvement required by the Tri-Party Agreement is one of its strengths, McCormick said. The agreement requires more public involvement that the laws regulating cleanup, giving the public a chance to influence important decisions about cleanup priorities and standards. Mike Lawrence, who signed the Tri-Party Agreement for DOE as the DOE Hanford manager in 1989, said the agreement has exceeded his expectation. “And that is in full recognition of the conditions that exist today,” he said.
Court-Enforced Decree Now Helps Govern Cleanup
The agreement lasted for 21 years before a portion of Hanford cleanup was moved under a court-enforced consent decree because of problems meeting deadlines in 2010 for some of the site’s most difficult work, emptying radioactive waste tanks and treating the waste. That consent decree is again the subject of controversy after DOE announced that most remaining deadlines in the consent decree are at risk. But that cleanup proceeded under a good faith agreement for more than two decades “was wonderful,” Lawrence said. “We knew we were dealing with imperfect information and needed to be flexible so we could modify milestones and objectives based on information as we really got hard data,” he said. The agreement, which has had more than 1,200 deadlines, has had more than 640 changes to deadlines or other modifications.
In the 25 years since the agreement was signed, far more waste that was ever anticipated was found, Faulk said. “It took years for us to get our feet on the ground,” he said. In the early years there was concern about whether cleanup could even be done and questions about how to safely do work such as dig up waste, he said. The cleanup work has “contained every cleanup challenge in the remediation industry,” from contaminated groundwater to treatment of high-level radioactive waste and everything in between, McCormick said. It’s been complicated by its proximity to the Columbia River and its importance to the people of the Northwest, he said.
New Challenges
New challenges continually arise. No plant has ever been built to treat the complex mixture of the 56 million gallons of waste held in underground tanks, say Hanford officials. The cleanup systems put in place must meet nuclear quality standards, built and inspected to the highest standard of operating safety, McCormick said. Workers can require extensive training to make sure hazardous work is done in a predictable and safe manner, he said. All work is highly regulated—by the state, the EPA and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board—and those checks and balances add time and expense, he said. Some Hanford cleanup work costs two-to-five times more than similar work done elsewhere in the state, according to Jane Hedges, the state’s nuclear waste program manager. That’s in part due to the hazardous nature of the work, she said.
One of the state’s concerns is that a DOE lifecycle cost study required by the Tri-Party Agreement shows that Hanford will need a sustained $3 billion to $4 billion a year for the next five years to meet cleanup obligations. A typical annual budget is closer to $2 billion, with about $800 million of that going to non-cleanup tasks such as maintaining facilities in safe conditions, utilities, security, roads and emergency. “To be successful in the long term, there is a need to convert more money from infrastructure and services into cleanup,” Faulk said.
Should TPA be Replaced?
Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge, said that a great amount of progress has been made in Hanford cleanup along the river and other projects are slowly being ticked off the list. But some of the most difficult projects remain. Aging underground waste tanks are in terrible shape, Carpenter said. The Waste Treatment Plant to treat tank waste is plagued with technical questions. And he calls the storage of radioactive cesium and strontium capsules underwater in a degrading concrete basin “terrifying.” If the pools were to lose water or if the capacity to cool the water is lost, a fire could result, he said.
Carpenter believes the Tri-Party Agreement has outlived its usefulness and should be renegotiated. In fact, he’d prefer that DOE not be both the owner of Hanford and in charge of environmental cleanup. It’s a conflict of interest, he said. Gephart is concerned that despite the impressive numbers DOE throws out on cleanup accomplishments, that DOE is talking about comparatively easy work like demolition of buildings, digging up shallow ground contamination and the treatment of only a fraction of the contaminated groundwater to date. “We do not have a defensible risk reduction study and management approach to understand how best to allocate our limited resources to ensure they are addressing the greatest risk reduction benefits,” he said.
As Lawrence looks back at the 25 years of cleanup he helped put in motion, he thinks the cleanup plan has stood the test of time, he said. But as tougher cleanup challenges are tackled, it is important not to make major mistakes, he said. Now it is time for the policy leaders to sit down with scientists and discuss what’s next, he said. As has been learned from 25 years of cleanup at Hanford, “something may look simple, but it is much more complex,” he said.
