KENNEWICK -- The Department of Energy undersecretary newly responsible for Hanford environmental cleanup has a bias for getting the job done, he said Wednesday after his first tour of the nuclear reservation.
That's the case whether it's starting operations at the Hanford vitrification plant or reusing un-needed Hanford land, said Thomas D'Agostino, the undersecretary of nuclear security.
He was in the Tri-Cities to speak at the 2011 Integrated Safety Management Champions Workshop in Kennewick, which drew 1,200 people from DOE projects across the nation. During his three-day visit he also toured Hanford and met with DOE Hanford leadership and staff and with community members.
D'Agostino became the undersecretary responsible for the Office of Environmental Management after Energy Secretary Steven Chu's department reorganization two months ago.
Among the issues he inherited are the questions about Hanford's $12.2 billion vitrification plant, including whether it can be finished on schedule and on budget, how much budget support Congress will give the plant and whether it will operate safely to treat all of Hanford's radioactive waste now held in underground tanks.
"I recognize there are technical challenges there," he told DOE Hanford employees at an all-staff meeting. There always are on such complex projects, he said.
But there comes a point where the biggest risk is leaving high-level radioactive waste longer in underground tanks, he said. Hanford has 56 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in underground tanks, many of which are known to have leaked in the past.
He is confident the vitrification plant is based on technology that's well understood and will work, he said. But a certain amount of flexibility will be needed as work moves forward, he said.
"My experience is we learn things as we do work," he said. "If you are rigid as you move forward, you cannot do it in an efficient way."
Bechtel National, which is building the plant, has said it is confident that the plant as designed can treat the vast majority of the high-level waste held in the tanks, but more testing is needed to prove it can treat the remainder of the waste. The less-challenging waste would be treated first.
Getting the plant up and running will help DOE learn its capabilities, said Scott Samuelson, manager of the DOE Hanford Office of River Protection.
"We will find a way to have it treat everything," he said.
But now DOE is trying to figure out what it can treat based on just 153 gallons of waste that have been sampled, forcing it to design the plant for a worst-case scenario of what may be in the rest of the waste, he said.
A case will have to be made for a plan that DOE leadership has confidence in all the way up to the energy secretary, and then the plan will have to be discussed with Congress and other interested parties, D'Agostino said.
"We have to have safety issues resolved," D'Agostino said. "Progress has been made."
A recent review of the vitrification plant found that with the plant's technical issues, anticipated savings had not materialized. That will challenge the ability to get the plant completed and operating in 2019 for $12.2 billion.
However, Bechtel and DOE Hanford leadership are looking for efficiencies in construction to trim costs, D'Agostino said. One change that should increase efficiency is a plan to construct the complex and extensive piping for some parts of the plant outside the building and then lift them into place with a crane, D'Agostino said.
It's the uncertainty of the stability of funding that can "cause a project to go haywire," he said.
Congress appears unwilling to support the proposed budget of $840 million for the vitrification plant in the coming year, instead including $740 million in appropriation bills. That does not bode well for the $970 million DOE would like in fiscal 2013.
The sooner DOE officials can talk to Congress and get an idea of what budgets are likely in coming years, the better able DOE will be to make a plan to build and commission the plant with whatever resources are available, Samuelson said.
On other Hanford projects, D'Agostino repeatedly praised the plan to shrink the portion of the nuclear reservation requiring cleanup from 586 square miles to 75 square miles at its center by 2015.
"This is something everyone can understand and can see it done in a few years," he said in his speech at the workshop.
But he will be challenging the DOE Hanford Richland Operations Office, which is responsible for river corridor and central Hanford cleanup, to do work more efficiently, he said.
He is focused on making a business case for work and has not been afraid to make unpopular decisions to reduce costs at the National Nuclear Security Administration sites he oversees in addition to his new role overseeing DOE Office of Environmental Management sites, he said.
D'Agostino's visit to Hanford came days after the release of a report commissioned by Chu looking at management in the Office of Environmental Management and calling for improvements.
At the DOE all-staff meeting D'Agostino said he wants decisions to be made efficiently by making clear what authority the Hanford DOE and other site offices have and then letting decisions be made as much as possible locally.
D'Agostino brings to his new responsibilities at Hanford a personal interest in seeing unneeded land reused, he said. He worked to get land turned over at DOE's Rocky Flats, Colo., site after cleanup work was completed there, he said.
As DOE works on a new initiative to plan turnover of land complexwide as cleanup is completed, he'd like to pick out something that can be completed in a year or two and get the job done, he said.
That could be the Tri-City Development Council proposal requesting 1,341 acres of unused Hanford land next to Richland city limits for economic development, he said. Projects on the land could support 2,400 to 3,400 jobs to help replace jobs lost at Hanford, according to TRIDEC.
With the DOE reorganization and changes in leadership, there has been no drop in the support for community reuse of unneeded land and economic development, said Matt McCormick, manager of the DOE Hanford Richland Operations Office.
-- Annette Cary: 582-1533; acary@tricityherald.com
