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HANFORD WATCH NEWSLETTER
Between now and then the government has to set aside enough money to pay for the logs, or to repay investors in the vitrification plant if the government should default on the project. With BNFL borrowing billions of dollars from investors for several years, substantial amounts of interest are involved, increasing the total cost. There are doubts as to whether Congress will appropriate enough money for the set aside fund. We asked Todd Martin, a consultant and expert on Hanford’s tanks, to tell us how the contract could be made more workable. His response is below.
So what DOE should do is, (1) reduce the interest rate being paid; (2) reduce the time that the government has to pay interest on the contractor's money; and (3) still maintain incentive for the contractor to complete the job. The way to do this would be a mix of public and private financing somewhere between what DOE wants to do and what Gerry advocates. I'm not sure where the right line is. I'll leave that to the experts. Second, DOE should make progress payments while still requiring a certain amount of contractor equity to ensure performance. In other words, when design is done, BNFL should be paid the agreed upon fixed price for design. Minus maybe 20% that would be held until glass was produced to maintain incentive. Then, when construction was satisfactorily completed, BNFL would be paid, again minus the 20%. And so on. In this way, the government isn't paying 10-15 year's worth of privately financed interest on several billion dollars. This would dramatically reduce costs without losing the important incentives.
Buske's report calculates that the average strontium reading along
the river shore east and southeast of H Reactor is 70 picocuries per
liter of ground water. At eight picocuries per liter, the risk of bone
cancer increases for someone steadily drinking that water. A 1997 Department
of Energy annual environmental report -- the latest available -- noted
a reading of 51 picocuries per liter in the area Buske studied.
The study found that the Department of Energy continues to rely on
the general philosophy that when ground water or soil is contaminated,
water or soil should be pumped or excavated. But increasingly, scientists
have concluded that those methods are often ineffective. Instead, they
stress new technologies that treat contaminants without removing them.
For example, electrical fields can be used to extract metal and radionuclide
contaminants from soil, while steam can be used to move contaminants
into recovery wells.
Private industry has developed new approaches that neutralize or immobilize
the contaminants where they are, the report said. But institutional
inertia prevents them from being adopted by the department. The financial
rewards for the private contractors who do the cleanup work at sites
such as Hanford lie in persisting in using old methods that don't work.
Otherwise, they would gamble on new methods that would get the job done
but that haven't gone through an interminable bureaucratic vetting process.
The DOE needs to concentrate on the most promising cleanup methods
and develop new technologies that work for both radiation and chemical
pollutants under shrinking federal budgets, the National Academy of
Sciences said in a report released late Thursday. "The technology that
often is used to remediate contaminated sites is simply ineffective
and unable to accomplish the massive job that needs to be done," said
committee chair C. Herb Ward, a Rice University professor of environmental
science, engineering, ecology and evolutionary biology.
``We would favor getting the Energy Department out of Hanford Site
and out of Rocky Flats and other sites where there is no mission other
than cleanup, and appointing a local control board to oversee the cleanup
in the interests of that region,'' Mr. Carpenter said. Lesser federal
agencies, such as the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Environmental
Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration,
could take over other aspects of the Energy Department's work, he said.
"Saturated with cynicism, an arrogant disregard for authority, and a staggering pattern of denial...organizational disarray, managerial neglect...prevasive inefficiency..." Two days earlier, on Tuesday, the Times ran an article about how the DOE was simply disregarding orders from the U.S. President regarding changes in security procedures. As I sat at the glassification meeting that same evening, listening to Mike Lawrence and Dick French discuss their ambitious plans for reorganizing the Hanford cleanup, I couldn't help comparing their ambitious goals to the picture in that article. Dick's "five points" included "direct control of the Office of River Protection budget," "full contracting authority," and "appropriate delegation of authority from DOE headquarters." But to make those things happen, they're going to have to buck a system that doesn't even take orders from the President.
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