Top DOE official says feds are showing Tri-Cities they can get Hanford clean

The Hanford nuclear reservation is poised for a strong environmental cleanup year after successfully meeting some tough challenges in recent years, said Paul Dabbar, the Department of Energy’s under secretary for science.

Showing it can take ownership of problems, change course and finish projects at the nation’s most contaminated nuclear weapons production site was behind the record budget set by Congress for Hanford cleanup in the current fiscal year, he said.

“There has been a real focus by us as a department to show the community, including the state — that these things under our control, which include construction and operations — that we wanted to take the lead and do those and do those well,” Dabbar said.

He was at Hanford last week to celebrate the completion of construction on the parts of the $17 billion vitrification plant needed to start treating millions of gallons of low activity tank waste by the end of 2023. Construction began in 2002.

“It is an exciting kind of capstone to the last couple of years,” he said.

Pivoting to find a way to start treating some of the Hanford site’s 56 million gallons of radioactive waste is one of the challenges DOE has overcome, he said. The waste was planned to be prepared for treatment at a massive building at the vitrification plant, the Pretreatment Facility, but construction on it is on hold following technical issues.

DOE instead is deploying a small tank-side pretreatment process, developing the solution for part of the tank waste at the same time that it addressed a slowly slipping schedule to start treating waste by a court-ordered deadline of the end of 2023.

Senior DOE and Bechtel National contractor officials met monthly to comb through data and set standards that helped catch up the schedule on the project, Dabbar said. While a Hanford goal of getting construction on key parts of the plant in fall 2020 was not met, the federal court construction deadline of the end of 2020 was met.

The challenge was met despite dealing with changes to construction work to keep employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic.

There were other major challenges overcome, Dabbar said in an interview with the Tri-City Herald.

Hanford successes

Last February Hanford workers finished tearing down the highly contaminated Plutonium Finishing Plant without any additional uncontrolled spread of plutonium. It was the largest, most complex plutonium facility in the nation.

The project earlier was plagued with the airborne spread of plutonium, with dozens of workers inhaling small amounts of radioactive contamination and very small amounts of radioactive material detected just inside the secure borders of the nuclear reservation.

In another project completed in fall 2019, Hanford workers finished moving radioactive sludge from underwater storage at the former K West Reactor basin near the Columbia River to safer dry storage in the center of the 580-square-mile site.

It also responded to the May 2017 collapse of a tunnel storing defunct equipment contaminated with highly radioactive waste by stabilizing both the collapsed tunnel and a similar tunnel at the PUREX processing plant in spring 2019.

In December, Congress approved a record-high environmental cleanup budget of $2.6 billion for the Hanford nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington.

“I can tell you for certain that Hanford has gotten greater support for the budget because of the successes,” Dabbar said.

From World War II through the Cold War, the Hanford nuclear reservation produced two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

The plutonium production left 56 million gallons of untreated radioactive waste in underground tanks; nine defunct production reactors; hundreds of buildings, some of them highly contaminated; radioactive waste burial sites that do not meet modern environmental standards; contaminated soil and contaminated groundwater.

Hanford in 2021

As 2021 starts, COVID-19 will remain a challenge as Hanford continues to bring all of approximately 11,000 workers back to the site, Dabbar said.

In the spring as few as 10% of workers were reporting to the site, with many others teleworking from home.

DOE also is planning to move ahead with more challenging work at the 324 Building just north of Richland city limits and near the Columbia River.

The building is standing over a spill of high-level radioactive waste that would be lethal on contact.

DOE plans to cut through the concrete base of the building above where the spill occurred and use a remotely operated excavator arm mounted in the building to dig it up.

It has been cautious about moving forward due to COVID and earlier budget uncertainties. In addition, it has waited for the transition to a new contract for much of Hanford cleanup work, with a new contractor in charge later this month.

“Once we get going, we don’t want to slow down,” Dabbar said.

Talks on tank waste and its treatment with the state of Washington are going well, he said.

The talks, being done with the help of a mediator, were started after state concerns that DOE would not be able to meet legal deadlines for emptying leak-prone underground waste tanks and treatment of the waste for disposal.

Recent successes have helped the DOE build the state’s confidence in its ability to overcome issues and get work done, Dabbar said.

It also helps that while talks are ongoing, DOE continues to accomplish work, including completing construction on the parts of the vitrification plant needed to start treating some of the least radioactive waste held in underground tanks, he said.

“At the end of the day, we have been quite transparent with the state and vice versa,” he said.

He gave no estimate for when talks might wrap up.

One project that is not moving forward during talks is the second phase of the Test Bed Initiative to demonstrate turning 2,000 gallons of the low activity radioactive waste in Hanford tanks into a concrete-like grout form and send it to a commercial repository in Texas for disposal.

Supporters of the project say it would dramatically cut costs to grout rather than glassify all of the tank waste at the vitrification plant and get waste treated sooner.

To date, the process has been demonstrated on three gallons of tank waste.

The next phase of the demonstration project has not been scheduled as the talks with the state continue, but DOE remains very interested in the project, Dabbar said.

This story was originally published January 11, 2021 at 12:59 PM.