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HANFORD Eight years into work at Hanford's massive vitrification plant, the project has passed the halfway mark, the Department of Energy announced Thursday.
"It's great to be on the top side of the hill looking down," said Suzanne Dahl, of the Washington State Department of Ecology, the regulator on the project. "From now on we're getting closer and closer to getting waste into a glass form."
There were years when the ability to get a plant built to turn Hanford's worst radioactive waste into a stable glass form for permanent storage or disposal appeared in doubt. Plans made in 1989, 1993 and 1996 were terminated before any concrete was poured.
The current $12.3 billion plant has had technical issues to overcome, plus schedule delays, budget increases and an expansion of treatment capacity. It originally was planned -- under what turned out to be a wildly unrealistic schedule -- to be handling radioactive waste two years ago and in full-scale operation in 2011. It's now expected to start operating in 2019.
As disappointing as delays in the Waste Treatment Plant's schedule have been, "the good thing is, it was never terminated," Dahl said.
"While there may be challenges ahead, our progress to date gives us confidence in a successful completion," said Ted Feigenbaum, Bechtel project director for the plant. "It's going well."
Eight years into construction, design and purchasing for the plant, $5 billion of the $12.3 billion currently budgeted has been spent to get to the halfway mark, said Shirley Olinger, manager of the DOE Hanford Office of River Protection. That includes $500 million spent on research and technical development.
That leaves well over half the budget remaining to complete construction and commission, or get the plant ready to operate, in about nine years.
The project also is closing in on another important milestone, resolving all 28 technical issues that an independent panel identified in 2006 as needing to be addressed to assure confidence in the plant's operations.
Just one issue remains, and it's close enough to being resolved that Feigenbaum is calling it half an issue. Work still is under way to make sure that radioactive waste will be adequately mixed in fewer than 10 of 38 tanks of concern, which will be in areas of the plant that will be too radioactively hot for workers to enter once operations begin.
The technical issues that have been addressed, such as whether the piping will plug or whether a waste sampling system can keep up with demand, have been questions about throughput -- capacity and efficiency -- rather than whether the plant will work, Olinger said.
The issue is reliability, Feigenbaum said.
Olinger's goal is to push to get the plant finished and operating, remembering that perfection can be the enemy. "Let's not try to make it so perfect we do not get on with the real purpose of it," she said.
"Some of the tanks are 67 years old," she said. "By the time we get done with our mission they will be 97 years old."
Now 53 million gallons of radioactive waste are held in underground tanks at Hanford awaiting treatment. The waste was created during World War II and Cold War production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.
Olinger is focusing on ways to make sure the plant is completed on time, a bigger worry to her now than meeting budget, which she says the plant is on track to do.
She's looking at building some cushion into the schedule by turning over some of the large, but less complex facilities, for commissioning early, before other facilities are completed. That would halve the number of people who would need to be hired and then trained to get the finished facilities commissioned, or ready to operate. It also would leave less work stacked up in the final years and months before operations begin.
Bechtel National also is looking at strategies to get the engineering design completed earlier to accelerate the schedule, Feigenbaum said. Engineering design work was scheduled to be completed in 2014, but DOE would like to see that moved to the end of 2011.
Already design of the plant is 90 percent complete. With technical issues mostly finished and design potentially completed sooner, Bechtel can concentrate on construction, the firm's specialty.
However, some complex building is ahead of Bechtel.
The plant will have 1 million feet of piping. About 340,000 feet have been installed so far, but the installation of the first of the most complex piping systems is not expected to start until next month. The congested piping will make construction difficult, and piping units already built in modules will have to fit precisely into the plant and connect correctly to other piping.
The state Department of Ecology, where 14 employees pore over the details of the design, also appears to have passed the halfway point in its work to approve and issue permits for the plant. Completed permits for the plant now weigh 200 pounds and are in binders that would be 14 feet high if stacked.
"Over the years, nearly 10,000 people have touched this historic project," Feigenbaum said.
Construction workers at the plant have poured nearly 200,000 cubic yards of concrete and installed 14,000 tons of steel. Two of the four largest buildings on the vit plant campus -- the Analytical Laboratory and the Low Activity Waste Facility -- are enclosed and interior work is under way.
Exterior construction is under way on the two largest and most complex structures. The Pretreatment Facility is 77 feet tall now and the High Level Waste Facility is 37 feet tall. In addition, about 20 smaller support and utility structures are being built on the plant's 65-acre campus.
"We are optimistic about our future," Olinger said. Treating the radioactive waste stored in underground tanks is critical to Hanford environmental cleanup and "the vitrification plant provides the cornerstone to accomplish this mission," she said.
-- Visit www.tricityherald.com to see a photo gallery provided by Bechtel showing construction progress at the plant over eight years and a second gallery showing the plant today.
-- Annette Cary: 582-1533; acary@tricityherald.com
