HOUSE APPROPRIATORS EXPRESS CONCERN OVER SOME CLEANUP PROJECTS

By ExchangeMonitor

House appropriators took the Department of Energy to task for issues experienced on several major cleanup contracts in the report accompanying the Fiscal Year 2014 Energy and Water Appropriations bill, released yesterday ahead of today’s scheduled full Appropriations Committee markup. Among the projects that came in for criticism in the report is the Savannah River Site’s Salt Waste Processing Facility. DOE and project contractor Parsons recently finalized a contract modification that increases the cost and schedule for completing construction of the SWPF that was necessitated due primarily to lengthy delays experienced in the delivery of a key component. The spending bill would provide $120 million for the SWPF, an increase of $28 million from DOE’s request. In their report, though, lawmakers criticized DOE for failing to provide more information about how it plans to complete and startup the facility, as well as for the length of time it took to reach agreement with Parsons. “While the Committee is encouraged by recent efforts to exercise options within existing contracts that hold contractors more accountable and to negotiate new performance-based contracts which share risk and reduce waste, the Department is also accountable for developing credible plans that will not waste taxpayer dollars. The extended time it has taken the Department to resolve its plan is not acceptable for an ongoing major project, and significant delays of construction will drive up costs.”

House appropriators also expressed concern over two major projects underway at Hanford, including the site’s Waste Treatment Plant. The House energy spending bill would provide $675 million for the WTP, a cut of $15 million from DOE’s request that the report says is because of the current halt to construction activities at the plant’s Pretreatment Facility and “the lack of a clear overall plan to complete the facility, the continued failure to provide timely information, and the continued management of the project without valid performance data against which it can track progress.” The report goes on to state, “The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently reported that, ‘daunting technical challenges that will take significant effort and years to resolve, combined with a near tripling of project costs and a decade of schedule delays, raise troubling questions as to whether this project can be constructed and operated successfully.’ The revelations regarding the extent of the outstanding engineering issues are deeply troubling, and the Department needs to make considerable improvements in its management of the project to ensure it will operate safely. The WTP is a critical project that must move forward, but the budget request provides little transparency into how the Department is using its funding to advance the project or whether it is able to track and manage ongoing work.”

In addition, the report has strong words for DOE’s management of D&D activities at Hanford’s Plutonium Finishing Plant. “Only a year after completing a new baseline for a subset of the overall cleanup project, DOE is again behind schedule, and the project continues to face the risks of work stoppages and employee turnover that have contributed to these delays,” the report says. “In addition, the DOE Inspector General’s review of work on the Central Plateau found several issues with timely reporting of performance information and that the Department had not corrected those performance issues. The Committee continues to support a measured and constant pace of work at the facility that emphasizes employee safety, particularly considering that increasing the pace of activities there is not necessary to meet the 2016 consent milestone for facility disposition.”

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