DOE: Maintenance Issues Contractor’s Responsibility
Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
3/28/2014
With last month’s truck fire at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant raising concerns over the state of maintenance activities at the facility, the Department of Energy said this week that any maintenance issues were the responsibility of the site’s managing contractor while state and local officials are charging that not enough WIPP funding has been provided. DOE officials have stressed that adequate funding has been provided to perform maintenance, but New Mexico Environment Department Secretary Ryan Flynn said this week: “NMED does not believe that funding levels for the WIPP are anywhere near where they need to be in order to ensure the continued success of the facility.”
Flynn emphasized WIPP’s role in the cleanup program. “WIPP is one of the most valuable assets in the nation’s nuclear weapons program and WIPP continues to help other states successfully remediate their existing contamination sites,” he said in a written response. “Yet, when it comes to funding, WIPP’s relative value appears to be given little weight and the facility is left fighting over table scraps. Given the importance of WIPP to the nation’s nuclear weapons program and to other states’ remediation efforts, it simply does not make sense for the federal government to continue to underfund one of our most important assets.”
‘The Money Is There For the Work To Be Done’
But so far no link has emerged between funding and recent WIPP incidents. An investigation is still ongoing on the cause of the Feb. 14 radiation release at WIPP (see related story), and a report on the Feb. 5 underground fire of a salt truck found that poor vehicle maintenance contributed to the fire (WC Monitor, Vol. 25 No. 12). This week DOE cleanup chief Dave Huizenga said that WIPP maintenance is the contractor’s responsibility. “What people need to recognize is that doing proper maintenance to make sure that operations can be conducted safely, that’s not an afterthought or something that you do only if you have money to do it. This is not a money issue,” Huizenga told WC Monitor on the sidelines of a Senate Armed Services Hearing. “It’s in the contracts, the money is there for this work to be done and it’s the contractor’s responsibility to make sure that they are doing it.” WIPP contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership did not respond to requests for comment this week.
DOE: Maintenance Spending Increased
The proposed maintenance and repair budgets for DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office, which oversees WIPP, went down from about $16.2 million in Fiscal Year 2009 to about $10.4 million in Fiscal Year 2013. The site’s overall budget requests decreased from $211.5 million to $198 million during the same time period. The maintenance request bounced back to $14.4 million in the FY’15 request, but the site was operating on the older budgets almost up to the point of the February incidents. During the same time frame, the aging repository took on a more high-profile role in the complex with both Savannah River’s Recovery Act accelerated transuranic waste disposal efforts and, more recently, the 3,706 campaign to remove aboveground-stored transuranic waste at Los Alamos.
However, the maintenance and repair estimate in each budget request “reflect initial estimates of standard annual maintenance to potentially occur in that year, they are not specific maintenance request amounts,” according to a DOE spokesman. “A comparison of the actual expenditures over FY 2009-2013 illustrates that maintenance expenditures have increased by 32 percent.” The spokesman added: “The details and costs of the specific activities are refined during execution due to the dynamic nature of repository operations and the need to address emergent operational conditions.” Additionally, the final funding appropriated by Congress in recent years for WIPP has exceeded the budget request.
Carlsbad Office Put Together 10-Yr. Maintenance Plan
But maintenance funding has been an ongoing focus at WIPP, and late last year DOE’s Carlsbad Field Office put together a pamphlet outlining a 10-year plan for maintenance funding that local officials used to lobby DOE and lawmakers for the money. “We don’t think the maintenance money has been adequate. They’ve been behind constantly. It’s such an important facility for the overall cleanup of the United States and it’s ridiculous not to maintain the facility,” John Heaton, head of the Carlsbad Mayor’s Nuclear Task Force, told WC Monitor. “It’s not as if it wasn’t described perfectly for them. It’s unfortunate. They’ve got a budget to balance and they go where the politics are and not where the performance is really needed.”
‘Penny Wise and Pound Foolish’
The fact that the WIPP contract is performance-based also led to a lower emphasis on maintenance, Heaton said. “The contracts are driven by putting waste in the hole, not by how well maintenance and equipment and the facility is maintained,” he said. “The incentives are in the wrong place.” He added that WIPP has been a low priority for funding because it had a stellar track record for its first 15 years of operations. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease. There was no reasonable review of the needs. What’s $10 million in a $5.6 billion budget? It’s peanuts to maintain the single most important cleanup facility in the United States. It doesn’t make sense, it’s penny wise and pound foolish.”