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Construction of $12.2 Billion Plant
To Turn Nuclear Waste into Glass Takes Shape in Eastern
Washington State
Feb 08, 2011 -Seattle Times -
McClatchy Tribune News
RICHLAND, Wash. — Rising from the desert sand
in eastern Washington state is a construction project
unlike any in history.
The buildings going up in this gated-off stretch
of tumbleweed are reinforced with as much steel
as three Eiffel Towers. The concrete structures
are
being threaded with enough pipe to funnel water
200 miles to Seattle. Workers are installing
giant melting
machines, which will burn so hot they could turn
gold to soup.
This is supposed to be the most sophisticated garbage
disposal on Earth, the centerpiece of the Western
world’s costliest environmental cleanup.
It’s supposed to rid the Hanford nuclear
reservation of its deadliest poisons: 53 million
gallons of radioactive
waste, now buried in aging, leaky tanks. But
after nearly a quarter-century of preparation — and
cost estimates that have nearly tripled to $12.2
billion — builders still haven’t
resolved this project’s most vexing technical
and safety issues. That leaves some worried the
federal Department of Energy (DOE) and its contractors
may build
themselves into a corner and produce a plant
that’s dangerous
or doesn’t treat as much waste as expected.
They fear construction will drag on and increase
environmental risk, or cost billions more to
get right.
This one-of-a-kind plant is supposed to turn
the nuclear slop from Hanford’s 177 underground
waste tanks into glass. Today, the plant is
more than half-constructed. The DOE and its
contractors
are making the case to Congress that design
and planning are all but finished. But parts
of the plant still face risks of
bursting into flames, exploding or triggering
uncontrolled
nuclear chain reactions, according to project
documents, interviews and formal critiques
by scientists at
other federal agencies.
The government’s own tests show that equipment
may fail or pipes may clog in areas of the plant
so hot with nuclear waste that no human or machine
could ever get in and make repairs.
In addition, each of Hanford’s underground
waste tanks holds a unique mix of hundreds of toxic
compounds and radioactive isotopes. But crucial elements
of the plant’s testing and design were based
on samples that don’t reflect this unusual
cocktail.
“
We figured out how to put a man on the moon in 10
years using slide rules,” said Walt Tamosaitis,
a high-level Hanford engineer who said he was removed
from the project last year after raising safety concerns. “We
still can’t seem to get this right.”
To be sure, cleaning up Hanford’s atomic
mess after 40 years of bomb-making is devilishly
tricky.
The DOE and lead private contractor Bechtel
National insist they know how to make the plant
work. They
say they have a strategy for solving remaining
problems and point to an outside review by scientists
appointed
by DOE that suggests they are on track. They
say if future tests show an approach is risky,
they’ll
alter it. The plant is scheduled to begin
operating in 2019.
“
From the management perspective, we believe we
have a handle on the larger technical issues,” said
Delmar Noyes, the treatment project’s
deputy director for DOE. But the project
presents what some call
a “wicked
problem.”
Slight design changes in one area can trigger
a cascade of unforeseen issues elsewhere.
And the
plant is
being built before contractors have figured
out details of the final design. That worries
the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal
panel of nuclear
scientists appointed by the White House
to oversee Energy
Department
projects. The board makes recommendations
and updates Congress
about safety issues.
“
I think it’s fair to say the board is concerned
about many aspects of this project,” Chairman
Peter Winokur said in an interview.
Certainly Hanford cleanup demands haste.
The 586-square-mile Manhattan Project
site began
producing plutonium
for atomic weapons in the 1940s. Production
continued until Hanford’s last
reactor was shut down in 1987. The rush
to arms produced billions of gallons
of waste. Some of the hottest
was funneled
into concrete
and carbon-steel tanks that today are
decades past their projected life span.
Some have
spontaneously heated up or burped explosive
gases. Sixty-seven
are suspected to have leaked. At least
a million gallons of radioactive goo
has spilled
into
the ground and is working its way to
the Columbia River.
But year after year, cost overruns and
delays dogged cleanup.
The government spent $197 million building
processing plants and vaults to dispose
of waste by mixing
it with cement only to drop the idea.
It bagged plans
to melt and seal nuclear material in
insulated boxes — after
spending $418 million. Contractors got
bonuses for doing work after scheduled
start dates, and for completing
projects not needed for years.
As recently as 2009, auditors learned
a Hanford contractor had spent $103,000
in
taxpayer
money buying frozen
dinners for employees working overtime.
An inspector figured out the practice
was probably
illegal
but had been written into Hanford labor
agreements since 1955.
But there has been progress, too. Gone
are hundreds of millions of pounds
of contaminated dirt and
concrete, along with nearly one-third
of Hanford’s buildings.
Gone, too, are basins that housed
leaky pools filled with tens of thousands
of
deteriorating nuclear-fuel
rods. The spent rods are now packed
in steel and buried in concrete vaults.
Still, after more than 20 years of
full-time cleanup, the site’s
most urgent problem remains: the
tanks. Hanford’s tanks range
in size from 55,000 gallons to 1
million gallons, and they were built
between
the 1940s and the 1980s. The oldest
149 have only a single shell, and
much of the liquid from them
has been pumped into newer double-shelled
tanks. Remaining waste is a mix of
sludge, cakey salts,
gas and liquid. In all, the 177 tanks
hold two-thirds of the country’s
high-level bomb-making wastes.
Over the years, each has become a
distinct and changing caustic brew.
As tanks
filled during
the Cold War,
workers piped contents from one
to another. Some spilled during transfer.
Some was
dumped intentionally
into the ground to make room for
more. Chemicals and heavy metals
were added
to neutralize
waste, or to separate reusable
nuclear materials. Tank managers poured in
sodium so acids wouldn’t
dissolve tank walls. Water was
added and boiled
off. Record-keeping was poor or
inaccurate. No one knows precisely
what’s in
them.
“
The waste was changing and chemically reacting all
the time,” said Dirk Dunning, with Oregon’s
Department of Energy.
Visions of a plant that could melt
this garbage into glass to be safely
stored
forever gained
traction during the late 1980s.
The process is used in Europe
and South Carolina, but for substantially
smaller quantities of waste. It’s
never been tried with such a toxic
mix.
In the late 1990s, the DOE hired
a British company to design and
build the plant.
The government
sacked the contractor in 2000
after cost estimates rose
to $15.2 billion. Energy officials
then hired Bechtel, for $4.3
billion. As designed, Hanford’s plant
is supposed to pump waste from
the tanks
into a series
of holding
vessels. From there, the radioactive
elements will be separated and
turned into two kinds
of glass. But Bechtel, too, soon
faced criticism. It installed an important
holding
vessel only
to discover
later — and
by accident — that the
welds were faulty. It was forced
to return
flawed
steel beams.
Congressional investigators with
the Government Accountability
Office complained
repeatedly,
as early as 2003, that
the plant moved to construction
before proving parts of the
design would
work. Costs shot
back up to $12.2
billion. The project fell a
decade behind schedule.
An Army Corps of Engineers
report found little evidence
Bechtel
controlled costs. It reported
Bechtel and
DOE were overly optimistic
about how
fast and well they could
finish their work.
It revealed
engineers
were struggling to figure
out technical
problems — how
to protect against fires, keep
explosive gases from building,
or keep waste mixed
up safely. The report
was written in May 2005.
Five years later — halfway through construction — plant
builders still wrestle with the
same issues.
In the fall, a panel of
scientists appointed by
the DOE said
contractors had finally
found a reasonable “path
forward” with remaining
technical problems. Bechtel’s “professionalism
and effectiveness,” the
panel determined, would
keep the project on track.
But even those scientists
made clear that didn’t
mean the problems were
actually solved. And Bechtel’s
approach still makes other
scientists uneasy. For
example, one of the most
confounding
and dangerous
issues is how to
keep nuclear waste
stirred. A
consortium of university
researchers and DOE’s
own Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory said Bechtel’s
approach is based on overly
simple tests that are too
small to reflect
real-world
operations.
There are other concerns,
too. Fast tracking this
project has led to
so many late
design changes that DOE
officials recently claimed
the plant
was
too
complex. So they began
simplifying
the design by scaling
back safety measures.
For instance, because
waste can generate dangerous
gases, builders
first tried
designing and aligning
piping systems in ways
that prevented fires
and
mini-explosions.
But
now, pipes are
being designed
so that explosions
are expected and allowed;
plant operators will
just have to
keep them manageable.
An independent review
team raised concerns
about this
approach.
Other government
scientists said
Bechtel’s
confidence again seemed
based on simplistic tests.
Allowing explosions also
means
radiation leaks
are more likely.
Contractors
said that would
be OK because
leaks would quickly be
discovered and cleaned
up. But an increased
possibility
of leaks
makes it
that much more important
to understand and limit
exposure risks to workers
and the
public.
In the fall, scientists
pointed out that the
Energy Department
had underpredicted
by a factor
of four
just how far radiation
could spread in
an accident. The DOE
conceded its numbers
were
wrong but
insisted other calculations
guaranteed the public’s
safety.
One of those sounding
alarms is Tamosaitis,
an engineer
who helped
identify many
of the problems.
“
I maintain that debating how many hydrogen explosions
pipes can withstand is the wrong thing to be discussing,” Tamosaitis
said. “When you start adding up the marginal
factors … you’re setting the stage for
a major problem. You begin to see how an accident
like BP’s in the
Gulf could happen.”
Tamosaitis raised
these issues with
his bosses
last summer
but said he
was immediately
removed
from work
on the project.
He since has filed whistle-blower
claims
against the
contractors and
DOE. None will comment
on his case. A
Labor Department
investigation
is under way.
The Defense Nuclear
Facilities Safety
Board also has
questions about
whether the plant
will work
fast enough. As
is,
the plant isn’t expected to
process all the waste until 2047, and operational
costs could hit $100 billion. By then some of Hanford’s
underground tanks
will be a century
old.
And that schedule
is doable only
if everything
works
as planned.
Things at Hanford
often don’t
work as planned.
Some worry processing
the waste may take
longer, and the
plant is being
designed
to work for
only 40 years.
Recently, the Energy
Department reignited
a push for new
technologies, and
is working with
a company
to investigate
alternative waste-treatment
ideas.
Officials have
said the hope is
to reduce
the
timetable for Hanford
cleanup.
But critics like
Tom Carpenter,
with the
activist group
Hanford Challenge,
see that
as a tacit
admission the waste-to-glass
plant won’t
do as much as once
intended.
One of the technologies
being considered
is steam reforming — turning waste to gas using steam
and converting it to crystals — a
process once rejected
as inappropriate
for Hanford.
“
I think it shows how desperate they are,” Carpenter
said. “I think it makes clear they’re
worried it isn’t
going to work.”
Noyes, with DOE,
disputes that
characterization.
Others aren’t
sure what to
think.
Ken Niles, who
is head of
Oregon’s nuclear-cleanup
program, said he fears some of the current issues
are “significant.”
But he doesn’t
see any option
but pushing
forward with the plant. He acknowledges
his position
requires a
leap of faith.
“
I still believe the plant is going to work,” Niles
said. “But I believe that, in part, because
it has to. It’s
got to work.”
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