Nuclear Waste Plant Still a Work in Progress

Amid blowing dust and miles of sagebrush, giant construction cranes sat still one recent day at the Hanford nuclear reservation -- silent sentinels over the government’s largest construction project.

The goal is to build a plant to treat highly radioactive waste left from Cold War-era nuclear weapons production. Achievement is a long way off.

The U.S. Department of Energy, which manages the south-central Washington site, has encountered an endless stream of problems with the project since the contract was first awarded in 1998. Billions of taxpayer dollars already have been spent, yet the project is only about 30% complete.

Now the U.S. Department of Energy plans to slow construction after a new seismic study found the federal government had underestimated the impact a severe earthquake could have on the plant. Agency officials have repeatedly refused to say how much the price tag -- already at $5.8 billion -- will rise or when the plant may open as a result.

Regardless, industry insiders contend problems with the Hanford plant come with repercussions far beyond rural Washington state.

“This plant is the world’s largest and most expensive environmental remediation project, and there’s a lot of focus and attention in Congress on DOE’s ability to manage this project,” said Tom Carpenter, nuclear oversight program director for the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit whistleblower group that has been critical of the Energy Department.

“If this project were to fail, I think Congress would finally recognize this is the wrong agency to manage these types of projects,” Carpenter said. “There’s just too much at stake to continue on a failure path.”

The waste treatment plant has long been considered the cornerstone of cleanup at the highly contaminated Hanford site, which was created in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

Using a process called vitrification, the plant will turn decades-old radioactive waste into glasslike logs for permanent disposal in a nuclear waste repository.

The waste, about 53 million gallons, is brewing in 177 aging underground tanks at Hanford. Nearly 150 of the tanks have single-wall construction, some of which are known to have leaked into the aquifer -- threatening groundwater and the Columbia River, which is less than 10 miles away. Many tanks have outlived their design life, making retrieval of the waste a top priority.

“Without the vit plant, we don’t clean up Hanford,” said Jay Manning, director of the state Department of Ecology. “The problem is going to get worse; it’s not going to get better. The plant is the critical step that has to happen.”

The one-of-a-kind plant is massive: Once completed it will stand 12 stories tall and be the size of four football fields. Its problems have been large, as well.

The operating deadline already has been pushed back three times from the original deadline of 1999, with another delay likely. The Energy Department has levied fines against and withheld part of the fee for contractor Bechtel National over safety concerns. A watchdog group released a report last year concluding that the plant has a 50% chance of a chemical or radiological accident -- a report the Energy Department disputed.

Critics argue the current slowdown could have been avoided if the federal government had conducted a more thorough seismic review. Three years ago, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board raised concerns that the agency’s seismic review was inadequate.

In addition, the plant is being designed as it is being built, a method that has proven costly. The design is about 75% complete.

The price tag on the plant has grown from $4.3 billion to the current $5.8 billion, and Energy Department officials have said the cost will grow at least an additional 10% because of the seismic issue and other construction problems.

Congress has estimated the new cost could be as high as $10 billion -- a number closer to the $15.2-billion estimate former contractor BNFL Inc. proposed in 2000. The Energy Department fired the company shortly thereafter, pushing the operating deadline from 2007 to the current 2011.

The latest slowdown leaves state officials believing the problem is more about money than safety. This is the fourth try for the plant, Manning said, and every time the cost goes up, the federal government decides to go back to the drawing board and revisit the approach.

Manning said he understood that new Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman does not want to have to go to Congress twice to explain the rising cost of the plant. But giving elected officials another chance to question the viability of the project is dangerous, he said.

“What we really have heartburn with is stopping construction or even significantly slowing it down,” Manning said. “This would be a colossal waste of taxpayer money if we were to change course dramatically or abandon this plant entirely. It would be the absolute worst thing we could do.”

Abandoning the waste treatment plant is not an option, said Joonhong Ahn, associate professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley. The waste needs to be removed and treated for long-term storage, and the process needs to happen at Hanford because of the large volume and high radioactivity of the waste, he said.

“DOE’s hand is full,” he said.

Energy Department officials have said they remain committed to the plant. Mistakes may have been made, but only a review can determine that, and a slowdown will allow the design process to get further ahead of construction, Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell said during a recent visit to Hanford.

“Stopping the construction is only going to cost money, so I don’t think that’s a credible criticism of what’s going on,” Sell said. “The dollars matter, but we are not going to build an unsafe plant.”

At the same time, Sell said he understood the heightened scrutiny. With nuclear waste cleanup remaining a hot topic in environmental communities -- and the Bush administration seeking additional nuclear plants to diversify the nation’s power supply -- the Hanford plant’s role in national policy becomes even more dear.

“This project is central to our success in environmental cleanup, not just here at Hanford, but around the country. It is central to the success of this department in demonstrating that we can build major nuclear facilities at a reasonable cost and a reasonable schedule. That is something we have not historically done well,” Sell said.