WC Monitor
12/18/2015
IN DOE
The Department of Energy has determined there is no need for a new supplemental environmental impact statement (EIS) before a liquid form of highly enriched uranium is transported from Canada to the Savannah River Site in Aiken, S.C. Stakeholders, including nuclear watchdogs and congressmen, have called for an EIS before more than 6,000 gallons of the uranium are relocated from Atomic Energy of Canada’s Chalk River Laboratories in Ontario to SRS, where workers will reprocess the material at the H Canyon facility.
U.S. Rep. Brian Higgins (D–N.Y.) earlier this year introduced legislation calling for an EIS that would have required the Department of Homeland Security, Transportation Security Administration, and other agencies to conduct a terrorism threat assessment before shipping the uranium to SRS. The congressman expressed concern in May that the proposed route of the uranium would cross through a part of New York he represents. The shipment would go over the Peace Bridge and through western New York on its way south to South Carolina. Higgins said his bill would have given federal agencies the information they need to "develop policies that are informed by the terrorism threat picture."
The bill passed the House of Representatives but has not been taken up by the Senate. The Department of Energy continued playing down the need for another EIS in a new supplement analysis, titled "Foreign Research Reactor Spent Nuclear Fuel Acceptance Program: Highly Enriched Uranium Target Residue Material Transportation." The original EIS was completed in 1996 and an initial supplement analysis was conducted in 2013, according to SRS spokesman Jim Giusti. The 2015 supplement analysis, dated Dec. 2, determined that proposed changes in methods for transporting the material and any recent information related to potential impacts that could result from transporting the material would not be significantly different from the impacts reported in previous years.
The construction quality at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment Plant was satisfactory for the areas reviewed in an on-site visit in September, but some concerns remain, the Department of Energy Office of Enterprise Assessments said last week. The office reviews construction quality at the vitrification plant each quarter, varying the focus of each assessment. The latest review found pressure testing of piping, electrical cable pulling, structural concrete, and welding inspections satisfactory. But it raised continuing issues with electrical construction, plus a potential conflict of interest with Bechtel National’s dual roles as the electrical authority on the project and also the electrical designer and contractor.
As the electrical authority, Bechtel determines if its own design and construction methods comply with the National Electrical Code. “This defeats the intent of the AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction) function,” the Office of Enterprise Assessments report said. Similarly, when Underwriters Laboratories came on-site to review equipment shipped to the site prior to receiving Nationally Recognized Testing Laboratory review, Underwriters Laboratories was acting as a Bechtel subcontractor, the report said. UL based its evaluation on data supplied by Bechtel rather than generating its own data. Elsewhere at Hanford, the AHJ function is provided by the Hanford Site Electrical Safety Committee. The committee has representatives from each of the other major Hanford contractors and representatives from the DOE Richland Operations Office and Office of River Protection, but no Bechtel representative. If a question is raised on code compliance or interpretation, it is evaluated by the committee.
A longtime worker at the Hanford Site in Washington state on Sunday officially became chief engineer for the Office of River Protection, the Department of Energy said.
Elaine Diaz “will serve as principal technical expert for the development and implementation of engineering standard requirements and provides recommendations to senior management on nuclear safety and authorization basis guidance and policy criteria,” according to a DOE announcement. “She will also collaborate with multi-agency committees, panels and regulatory entities to exchange technical information pertaining to engineering and nuclear safety issues, policies and guidelines; and represents ORP as a technical expert as required – among myriad other technically related duties.”
Diaz has worked since 2007 with the DOE office overseeing construction of the Waste Treatment Plant and remediation and ultimate closure of the tank farms at Hanford, among other programs. She worked as a safety systems oversight engineer for the WTP project confinement ventilation and process gas treatment systems, and before that as a confinement ventilation cognizant system engineer, a system design engineer, and an engineering team lead for nuclear facilities at Hanford. Diaz received the DOE Safety Systems Oversight Annual Award in 2011.
Meanwhile, Washington state is continuing to accept applications for its nuclear waste program manager, a position that “is responsible for administering and managing the state and delegated federal programs to manage environmental cleanup of the Hanford Site and management of mixed hazardous and low level radioactive waste in the state of Washington. This includes implementing hazardous waste management, clean up, clean water and clean air regulations at the Hanford site and at sites that manage low level radioactive waste on and adjacent to the Hanford site and at the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard,” according to the job notice. Jane Hedges, who has held the position for nearly a decade, is scheduled to retire in February. More details, and the application portal, can be found here.
IN THE INDUSTRY
A group of unionized workers at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico have approved a new contract with site contractor Nuclear Waste Partnership.
The contract covers the roughly 255 members of United Steelworkers Local 12-9477, trades and crafts personnel who conduct waste handling, facility operations, maintenance, radiological protection, and mining operations at the transuranic waste storage facility. About 1,100 workers are employed at WIPP in total.
Nuclear Waste Partnership said it could not discuss details of the new contract except that it is for a four-year period. The United Steelworkers said in a press release Thursday that the contract provides workers with a 14-percent pay hike over the term of the contract, along with an immediate lump sum payment of $1,800 and full retroactive pay covering Aug. 1 to the Dec. 14 ratification.
“Nuclear Waste Partnership is pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement with the United Steelworkers on a new contract,” the company said in a prepared statement Tuesday. “ It took a lot of give and take on both sides to get the final issues resolved. We want to thank the USW leadership for their willingness to stay at the table so that a new contract could be negotiated. Now we can continue concentrating on restarting the WIPP facility.”
Waste storage operations have been suspended at WIPP since a vehicle fire and subsequent, unrelated radiation release in February 2014. The Department of Energy says it aims to reopen the site to new waste shipments by the end of 2016.
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management on Thursday announced the award of a contract to Sage Energy Trading of Jenks, Okla., to supply natural gas via the Tennessee Gas Pipeline Co. to the DOE Portsmouth site in Ohio. Sage Energy was the incumbent contract holder; its new firm-fixed price contract is for two years and a maximum of $3.5 million.
Separately, DOE on Thursday announced a $1.77 million, three-year contract to Cambridge, Mass.-based Industrial Economics for a “Natural Resource Damage Assessment and Restoration Plan based on injuries to natural resources from the release of hazardous substances from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.”