YAKIMA – The U.S. Department of Energy has notified Washington state officials that it likely will not meet the deadline for finishing a multibillion-dollar radioactive waste treatment plant at the Hanford nuclear reservation.
If the Energy Department fails to have the plant up and running by 2011, it would mark the fourth time the federal government has missed a deadline to complete its largest construction project.
The plant is being designed to treat highly radioactive waste left from decades of plutonium production for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. The Energy Department halted construction on major portions of the plant in September amid skyrocketing costs stemming from seismic issues and construction problems.
Federal officials have repeatedly refused to release a new cost estimate for the plant, currently tagged at more than $5.8 billion. Congress has estimated the latest problems could push the cost as high as $10 billion and delay the start by another four years.
The Energy Department notified state officials Thursday that a new cost estimate and schedule for completing construction on the plant would not be ready before June.
“We continue to be frustrated by this update, but at the same time agree that USDOE and the contractors should do the job right and not make promises they cannot keep,” Sandy Howard, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Ecology, said Friday.
Howard also said it was too soon to say if the state would consider legal action against the federal government. Under the Tri-Party Agreement – the legal pact signed by the state Department of Ecology, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department, which manages cleanup at Hanford – the plant was to have been fully operating by 2011.
Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman committed to notify both the state’s governor and congressional delegation of developments related to the plant when they are available, Energy Department spokesman Mike Waldron said.
“Based on our review to date, there are a number of technical issues that have made it clear we likely will not be able to meet the 2011 milestone,” Waldron said.
The federal government still must formally notify state officials and Congress of an expected cost increase of at least 25 percent, as required by law, Waldron said.
“The secretary remains committed to the goals and objectives of the Tri-Party Agreement, the completion of the waste treatment plant and to our cleanup obligations at Hanford,” Waldron said.
The Energy Department also notified the state that it may not meet two deadlines for cleaning up sludge from two leak-prone pools of water near the Columbia River. The K East and K West basins were built at Hanford to store spent nuclear fuel, but cleaning them up has proven more difficult than anticipated.
The federal government was to have sludge removed from the K East basin by July 31, 2006, and all sludge from the K West basin in containers by June 30, 2006. The Energy Department warned it may miss both deadlines.
The waste treatment plant has long been considered the cornerstone of the cleanup effort at Hanford, which was created in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, it is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.
The greatest risk is posed by 53 million gallons of decades-old radioactive waste brewing in 177 underground tanks. Retrieval of the waste is a priority, because some of the tanks have leaked, threatening the aquifer and the Columbia River less than 10 miles away.
The plant will use a vitrification process to turn the waste into glasslike logs for permanent disposal in a nuclear waste repository. Once completed, it will be 12 stories tall and be the size of four football fields.
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