Hanford news

Paige Knight, Hanford Watch, April 6, 2006

To all our readers, you will be hearing from me more frequently than usual with updates on the many activities that are or are not happening at Hanford. I have been less active (but still in the loop) this past year with family taking a top priority and teaching becoming more demanding. It is good to have my energy back and a renewed desire to communicate with you as much as possible.

We just had scoping hearings on the new Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement during the past two weeks. Ninety-eight citizens turned out in Portland and 55 in Hood River to give input into what the scope of the new Environmental Impact should be. This EIS, when it is finalized, will be the blueprint for many cleanup actions that theoretically should lead to "closure" of the Hanford site. However, we are currently in a downward cycle with Hanford Cleanup.

The Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) which is supposed to immobilize much of the waste buried underground in 177 aging tanks is seriously behind schedule and well above cost. I suspect it will double at least in the next few years from the somewhat recent figure of $690 million. Reasons are systemic issues such as inadequate designs of some of the systems that are crucial to the plant working -- design sufficiently flexible to reliably process all of the Hanford tank farm wastes, line plugging in the transport lines that bring waste from tank to WTP, more complete understanding of the operating limits of the plant and its processes, loss of expertise base due to lack of funding. These are just a few of the issues found by an Independent Team of External Experts ( referred to at Hanford as "The Best and the Brightest Team"). Technical issues, seismic redesigning, increased cost for steel (which is not available in the U.S.) as well as limited funding threaten this project. This is the fifth time that the U.S. DOE has committed to a waste treatment facility and has come up short.

The Army Corp of Engineers in March 2006 issued a "Status Report on Independent Validation Review Effort of Estimate of Completion" of the Waste Treatment Plant.The plant has been in the works for five years under the current design/build contract, which keeps the scope, cost and schedule in flux, meaning that there is no reliable baseline for the project. The cost initially was $4.324 billion and has grown since the March 2003 figure of $5.78 B to a cost estimate as of Dec. 2005 of $10.537.

With these funding and design problems the start of operations of the Vitrification Plant in 2011 as defined in the Tri Party Agreement (TPA) is expected to now be 2017 or beyond. Congress does not seems to have the will to fund this plant and other Hanford Cleanup operations to the level needed. As long as projects are funded year to year without looking at life-cycle costs and risks, we will remain in dire straits.

Another effort to insure that tank wastes are put into a solid form, bulk vitrification, has offered promise but currently has slowed down due to technical difficulties, escalation of project costs and no funding allocated for the construction of the pilot facility. Many of us are wondering why so much money and effort is being placed on an alternative (to the WTP) when we could use that to get the WTP going.

I am disturbed that once again the DOE, the President and Congress are reneging on a past commitment to clean up the Hanford site. We are the most contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere.

In the next report I will update you on the work that has been done on the cleanup of the Plutonium Finishing Plant and the K-Basins. I welcome questions and comments from you to further our understanding and ability to give informed input to the DOE, the Washington Department of Ecology and the Environmental Protection Agency -- the three agencies responsible for restoring the health of our region when it comes to Hanford's impacts.