CH2M Hill gets ‘excellent’ rating for Hanford work

The Department of Energy announced this week that it has rated the work of CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. at Hanford as “excellent” for fiscal 2015.

The contractor, which is responsible for groundwater and central Hanford cleanup other than waste storage tanks, earned 95 percent of the incentive pay available for the year.

It is eligible to receive $10.6 million of a possible $10.9 million available, according to a summary released by DOE.

The pay was based both on performing specific work and on a subjective evaluation. It earned about 90 percent of the pay available for the subjective analysis, or all but about $300,000.

The contractor removed a record amount of contaminants from groundwater, finished construction of a building to be used to move radioactive sludge away from the Columbia River and removed significant hazards from the Plutonium Finishing Plant in fiscal 2015, said John Ciucci, CH2M Hill president.

DOE said in its summary that CH2M Hill was “very responsive” to the agency’s needs.

CH2M Hill had missed none of DOE’s legally enforceable Tri-Party Agreement milestones, the summary said.

The company completed work to meet 13 milestones, including drilling wells for groundwater treatment, certifying transuranic waste for shipment to a national repository and removing the last of the pencil tanks from the Plutonium Finishing Plant.

The plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility had highly contaminated pencil-shaped tanks up to 22 feet long hanging vertically on steel racks. They had to be removed with an aging crane that had been put in service when the facility was used during the Cold War to recover plutonium from scrap material.

DOE praised CH2M Hill for accomplishing a number of DOE’s key performance goals for cleanup.

It treated 2.1 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater at Hanford, injecting clean water back in the ground, CH2M Hill said.

It also removed the two high-hazard glove boxes that had been left for last at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, CH2M Hill said. Workers would use gloves attached to portals to reach into the boxes to process plutonium in a liquid solution, turning it into metal pucks for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

The two boxes stood 12 feet high and had high levels of plutonium contamination. Workers had to contend with significant levels of radiation.

CH2M Hill accomplished work on all its projects while maintaining injury rates that were much lower than the goals for DOE environmental cleanup sites, the summary said.

The contractor also excelled in small business subcontracting. It has awarded more than $2 billion on contracts to small businesses since 2008, the summary said.

Despite progress at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, the work there also was listed under deficiencies on the scorecard.

Work has slipped behind schedule to prepare the plant for demolition by September. The final evaluation of pay that CH2M Hill can earn for its work at the plant will be figured when demolition is completed, the summary said.

In fiscal 2014 CH2M Hill earned a slightly higher percentage of the pay possible, 98 percent, but less money was available and it earned $9.7 million.

This story was originally published May 5, 2016 at 4:30 PM with the headline "CH2M Hill gets ‘excellent’ rating for Hanford work."