Board says DOE rejected safety recommendations

The Department of Energy has rejected, in part, recommendations of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board meant to ensure safe operation of the Hanford vitrification plant, according to the board.

The matter now must be raised to the Congressional level because of what the defense board sees as a disagreement, according to weapons board Chairman Peter Winokur in a letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu on Friday.

Chu needs to make a final decision about whether to implement all or part of the defense board's recommendations and send a report to the House speaker, Winokur said.

DOE is building a $12.2 billion vitrification plant that will start treating 53 million gallons of radioactive waste in 2019 for safe disposal. The waste is left from the past production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.

At issue is whether the vit plant's mixing systems for high-level radioactive waste will be powerful enough to prevent particles of waste from settling out and building up. If waste accumulates, a criticality, or uncontrolled nuclear reaction, is possible. Flammable gas also could build up. In addition, a build up of solids could interfere with instrument readings needed to control the mixing system.

DOE announced in 2010 that technical issues at the vitrification plant had been resolved adequately to allow engineering and construction work at the plant to be completed. However, Winokur said at a special board meeting in Kennewick in October that the board was deeply concerned that the plant might be commissioned before several key technical issues are fully resolved.

DOE told the board at that meeting that it would perform additional testing, including a large-scale mixing test.

However, now the defense board said that DOE is not fully on board with what the board believes is needed to ensure safety.

It based that on a letter from Chu in February responding to defense board recommendations on further testing. The board characterizes Chu's letter as saying DOE "is in acceptance, but by its language or terms in fact rejects part of the recommendation."

"(DOE) provides clarifications that fundamentally redefine the board's recommendation and fall short of meeting its intent," Winokur said in his letter. "At this time, the board remains unclear about the actions DOE will follow to address the recommendation."

The board "reaffirms the recommendation in its entirety," Winokur told Chu.

By law, Chu now must make a final decision on whether to implement all or part of the recommendations and publish the decision and his reasoning in the Federal Register, Winokur said. Then that must be sent to the Senate Appropriations and Armed Services committees and House Speaker John Boehner.

The defense board was commissioned by Congress to provide independent oversight of nuclear safety at DOE weapons sites.

In December, the board followed up discussions at the October meeting and provided DOE with written recommendations for additional mixing testing at the vitrification plant.

Mixing of high-level radioactive waste will be done in areas of the plant called "black cells" because they will be too radioactively hot for workers to enter during the approximately 40 years the plant is operating.

A pulse jet mixing system has been designed without moving parts that could require maintenance. It will work like a turkey baster, sucking up a slurry of liquids and solids, then shooting it back out, dispersing the solids that start to settle. DOE also is proposing an additional system to clear out accumulated waste from the bottom of tanks.

The board recommended that the additional mixing testing address issues raised not only by the board but also by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which has done analysis of the mixing system design, and by the Consortium for Risk Evaluation and Stakeholder Participation, an independent technical review team under contract to DOE.

The board recommendations call for tests that would show the limits of the vit plant's mixing and transfer systems based on the wide range of physical properties in the waste that is planned to be treated. That would require sufficient information about the waste to ensure the validity of tests of the system.

The defense board also called for the mixing systems to be tested on a large scale to make sure that results from smaller tests held true on the scale that mixing will be done at the vitrification plant and to set limits on the types of waste the plant can accept and safely handle.

The board indicated that it believed DOE disagreed on specifics of what the large scale mixing should cover and of how larger and denser waste particles would be handled.

"The board fully appreciates that further testing could impact the project, but these impacts must be weighed against the substantial risk of proceeding without an adequate understanding of the performance limitations of the current design," Winoker said in the letter.

Potential issues need to be addressed before the start of vit plant operations, he said.

Safety of the mixing system at the vit plant became a hot button public issue last summer after Walter Tamosaitis, research and technology manager for the plant, was removed from the project. He has filed a lawsuit, claiming he lost his work assignment because he raised safety issues concerning the mixing system, which endangered much of a $6 million payment to Bechtel National, the contractor building the plant.

Bechtel National disagrees that Tamosaitis was removed from the project for raising mixing safety issues. It said his work had concluded and that he had sent an inappropriate email -- which was related to an announcement that mixing and other technical issues had been resolved -- to consultants on the project.

This story was originally published May 22, 2011 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Board says DOE rejected safety recommendations."