ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The Energy Department and one of its contractors have carefully insulated a critical liquid waste treatment system in Washington state from an impending stopgap spending measure that will freeze federal budgets at the current fiscal 2016 level, an official with Washington River Protection Solutions said Wednesday.
Congress, following Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) lead, is poised to pass a so-called continuing resolution this month to avert a government shutdown on Oct. 1. The bill could extend the 2016 budget into the lame duck session, or beyond into 2017. Depending on the length of the stopgap budget, the Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System that Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) is working on at DOE’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., might or might not be affected.
“If [the continuing resolution] just lasts one quarter, I don’t think there will be hardly any impact,” Mark Lindholm, president and project manager for WRPS, said in a brief interview here at the 2016 National Cleanup Workshop. “I still have to go back and do the analysis for if it lasts longer than a quarter.”
The Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System is being designed to separate low-level Hanford waste from sludgier high-level waste. This waste — about 56-million gallons, all told — is mingled together in Hanford’s tank farms, which WRPS manages under a 10-year, $6-billion tank operations contract awarded in 2008.
The pretreatment system, known as LAWPS, will funnel waste directly into the Waste Treatment Plant that Bechtel National is building at Hanford under a separate contract. DOE and its contractors plan to solidify low-activity waste into more easily storable glass beginning in 2022 in a process known as direct feed low activity waste processing. High-level waste treatment, which has suffered from technical and safety setbacks, must begin at the Waste Treatment Plant by 2036, a federal judge ruled in April.
