Washington State Wants More Details on Cost of Respirator Use at Hanford

The Washington Ecology Department wants more details about a contractor estimate that requiring workers to wear supplied air respirators at the Hanford Site’s waste storage tank farm could add years and hundreds of millions of dollars to cleanup of the Cold War-era Department of Energy site, according to official correspondence published online Wednesday.

Earlier this year, some 50 workers reported potential exposure to toxic vapors from Hanford’s tank farm, which holds tens of millions of gallons of chemical and radioactive waste left over from Cold War-era plutonium production at the site near Richland, Wash. The Energy Department and tank farm prime contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) have in recent months required the use of supplied air respirators inside tank farm fence lines to meet the terms of a union stop work order.

In September, DOE delivered to Ecology a report from AECOM-led WRPS that said mandatory respirator use would delay the emptying of five single-shell Hanford tanks by one year to 2021, and the emptying of nine tanks in the A and AX tank farms by two years to 2026. Costs would rise roughly between $300 million and $750 million, depending on how close workers would be allowed to the tanks without the respirators, WRPS said.

In its September letter to Ecology, DOE’s Office of River Protection said it asked WRPS to file the expanded version of its cost and schedule report by Oct. 5. The add-on filing was to include the company’s underlying assumptions for the cost increases and schedule delays, and ideas for getting tank retrieval back on schedule, should respirator use indeed become mandatory.

Nearly two weeks after that due-date, the Department of Ecology issued DOE a gentle reminder that Olympia also would like WRPS to show its work.

“[W]e would appreciate receiving a copy of WRPS’s response to ORP’s September 8, 2016, request for additional information about WRPS’s assumptions in developing its estimate of potential impacts to schedule and budget, and any other information you receive relevant to these issues,” Alexandra Smith, Ecology’s program manager for nuclear waste, wrote in an Oct. 17 letter to Kevin Smith, manager the Office of River Protection.

Ecology published the letter online Wednesday.

Washington state sued DOE in federal court last year over worker protection at Hanford. Trial is scheduled for May. Meanwhile, a federal judge is considering a preliminary injunction request from the state that would make supplied air respirators mandatory within the tank farm fenceline.