PHOENIX — A facility needed to treat low-activity liquid waste at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state will not be built until 2021 — the year before contractor Bechtel National must either prove its Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) is ready to treat low-activity waste, or forfeit more than $150 million in fees, according to a slide briefed here Tuesday by a DOE official.
The 2021 construction-complete date for this facility, the Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System (LAWPS), was disclosed on a slide shown here at the annual Waste Management Symposium by Delmar Noyes: WTP startup, commissioning, and integration assistant manager for DOE’s Office of River Protection.
Bechtel and DOE believe the WTP will be fully built around 2018 and nominally ready for hot commissioning — demonstrating the plant can process low-activity radioactive liquid waste from Hanford’s underground tank farms and turn it into glass cylinders — by the end of 2022.
Those dates assume LAWPS, designed to separate more viscous, more radioactive high-level waste from brinier low-activity liquid waste, is ready in time. LAWPS is being built by another DOE contractor, the AECOM-led Washington River Protection Solutions.
Noyes spoke on a panel moderated by his boss Kevin Smith, manager of the Office of River Protection. Smith declined to say whether the 2021 construction-complete date for LAWPS posed risks for starting low-activity waste treatment the next year.
“We are telling folks we’ll make glass [from low-activity waste] as soon as 2022,” Smith told Weapons Complex Morning Briefing after the panel.
Despite Bechtel’s great financial incentive to start making glass by 2022, the legally mandated startup date for low-activity waste treatment is Dec. 31, 2023: the date a federal just last year wrote into the consent order that governs liquid waste cleanup at Hanford. Under the same consent order, high-level waste treatment must begin by 2036.
Bechtel National did not immediately reply to a request for comment Tuesday.
