DOE: No Hanford waste to Idaho this winter

The Department of Energy dropped plans Friday to send 1,000 drums of Hanford radioactive waste to Idaho for treatment this winter.

"It's a tough time for people" and DOE wants to limit some of the stress on workers as the site shifts to new contractors, said Dave Brockman, manager of DOE's Hanford Richland Operations Office.

Thursday, about 50 union employees at Hanford protested in front of the Federal Building and along George Washington Way in Richland, fearing that what they saw as "outsourcing" of Hanford work would cost them jobs.

"These employees are important to us," said Brockman, who made the decision to call off the shipments to Idaho. "It's not worth putting people through turmoil."

The plan to send transuranic waste -- typically debris contaminated with plutonium -- to Idaho is not off the table permanently, Brockman said. But now is not the right time and he doesn't see another opportunity any time soon to send waste to Idaho for compaction.

Hanford workers have argued they could compact the waste at Hanford and do it less expensively. However, DOE has disagreed with that and said the permit for the New Mexico repository that disposes of the waste only allows compacted transuranic waste to be sent from the Idaho compactor.

Although waste will not be sent to Idaho this winter, DOE is continuing with its plan to reduce Hanford work with transuranic waste.

It wants to use its Richland Operations Office budget for other work it believes is a higher priority to reduce risk from radioactive and chemical contamination and shrink the footprint of the nuclear reservation.

It plans to concentrate on protecting ground water, shipping weapons-grade plutonium off site and cleaning up Hanford along the Columbia River.

That also means there will be no reason for the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Central Characterization Project to work with Hanford transuranic waste in the near future.

Hanford workers had been concerned that the Central Characterization Project of Carlsbad, N.M., has been assigned to characterize and certify transuranic waste for shipment to the national repository in New Mexico.

Although Hanford workers have been doing that work, it was not included in the new CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. contract, which took affect this month.

With budget dollars now being shifted from work with transuranic waste to other projects, no waste may be shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Project, or WIPP, for disposal for several years.

DOE had been sending the waste to WIPP gradually as it was approved for shipment and trucks were available, but now it will build up large amounts of waste for concentrated shipping campaigns.

Hanford workers will continue to retrieve some possibly transuranic waste that was temporarily buried after 1970 before WIPP was available, but at a slower pace than in recent years. Some sorting of the waste also will continue at T Plant, but again the work will be reduced unless more money becomes available for Hanford projects.

DOE had planned to ship about 1,000 drums of transuranic waste to Idaho in November and December to be compacted at the Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Facility. Drivers and trucks would be available because WIPP will be temporarily closed for work on elevators and the Idaho plant has excess capacity.

Money for the Idaho shipments and compaction would not have come out of the Hanford budget, Brockman said.

Hanford will have at least as much money in the coming months for cleanup work as it did in the fiscal year that ended in September, so there would not be a net loss of jobs, whether the Idaho campaign had proceeded or not, Brockman said.

However, Fluor Hanford's contract was set to expire Sept. 30 and the CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. has taken over the Hanford cleanup work Fluor had been doing for more than a decade.

A contract for the remainder of Fluor's work, to manage services across the Hanford site, also was awarded. However, Fluor Hanford continues to provide services such as security and information technology because the contract award is under protest with the issue expected to be decided by the end of December.

The two new contractors may require a different mix of skills from workers, and not all Fluor Hanford workers are expected to be offered jobs. Fluor Hanford already has finished the first phase of a voluntary layoff program and is in the midst of a second.

That the transition to new contractors for the Richland Operations Office is happening at the same time trucks to ship waste to Idaho became available "is just terribly poor timing," Brockman said. It added to the mistaken impression that the Idaho project was driving who was offered jobs by the new contractor, he said.

The trucks will be shifted to DOE work elsewhere in the nation in November and December, Brockman said.

DOE also will continue to send some other radioactive waste off site for treatment as it long has done. That includes sending waste to Perma-Fix in Richland.