WASHINGTON – Poor management by the U.S. Department of Energy, mistakes by a private contractor and technical challenges are to blame for skyrocketing cost estimates for a new waste treatment plant at the Hanford nuclear reservation, a new report says.
In testimony submitted to Congress on Thursday, the Government Accountability Office said it will cost nearly $11 billion for a new plant to dispose of millions of gallons of radioactive waste at the sprawling Washington state complex.
That figure is in line with a report this week by a team of experts assembled by the Energy Department, who estimated the cost at about $11.3 billion. But it is nearly triple the $4.3 billion cost estimated in 2000, when the current contractor took over the long-delayed project.
“Contractor performance problems, DOE management shortcomings and difficulties addressing various technical challenges encountered during design and construction” all contributed to the cost overruns, the GAO report said.
Specifically, the report said Bechtel National Inc., the Maryland company hired to build the plant for the Energy Department, “has performed poorly” since taking over the project six years ago.
“Bechtel significantly underestimated the price of steel and how much engineering effort would be needed to complete facility designs,” the report said. Those mistakes added at least $2 billion to the project costs.
Bechtel also failed on several occasions to ensure that nuclear safety requirements were being met, the report said, including failure “to detect serious construction flaws in tanks that will hold radioactive materials.”
Bechtel’s president, Tom Hash, acknowledged the company’s mistakes, but pledged to do better.
“We have a solution in front of us to finally solve a 60-year-old environmental nightmare,” Hash told members of the House Appropriations energy and water subcommittee.
The company, a subsidiary of engineering giant Bechtel Group, was fined nearly $200,000 last month for violating nuclear safety requirements – the latest in a series of problems with the treatment plant, which will convert millions of gallons of radioactive waste into glasslike logs for permanent disposal. The waste now is stored in leaking underground tanks near the Columbia River.
The so-called vitrification plant has long been considered the cornerstone of cleanup at the highly contaminated Hanford site.
Hash told House members that the project has proved more complex than even his best engineers predicted, but added that he was confident the federal government could “intelligently and responsibly spend $690 million” on the project in the budget year that begins Oct. 1, as President Bush has proposed.
That figure is $200 million higher than current spending, which was slashed after members of Congress and the Bush administration became concerned about cost overruns and other problems.
Washington Reps. Norm Dicks and Doc Hastings said the budget cuts have hurt the project and could cause more delays.
“It seems to me that a serious reduction in funding will only result in pushing the cleanup project further down the road … and present a risk of lawsuits,” said Dicks, a Democrat who serves on the Appropriations panel.
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