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Ted S. Warren / AP file
Workers usie heavy equipment to bury contaminated debris in a landfill on the Hanford nuclear reservation near Richland, Wash., on April 3, 2008.
RICHLAND, Wash. -- The federal government says a one-of-a-kind plant that will convert radioactive waste into a stable and storable substance that resembles glass will cost hundreds of millions of dollars more and may take longer to build, adding to a string of delays and skyrocketing price tag for the project.
In addition, several workers at southeast Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation have raised concerns about the safety of the plant's design — and complained they've been retaliated against for voicing their issues.
The turmoil has some in the Pacific Northwest uneasy about the plant's long-term viability and fearful that a frustrated Congress could balk at paying more money for a project long considered the cornerstone of cleanup at the highly contaminated site.
"The risk from the materials we are dealing with over there is simply too great (not to complete the plant)," Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "Here, we thought we were making such progress, and now to learn that, for reasons I don't know, we're at serious risk of missing more milestones is disappointing."
Issues raised by the whistleblowers about the plant's safety would be equally disconcerting, Gregoire said.
Roughly one-third of the federal government's entire budget for nuclear cleanup — about $2 billion each year — goes to Hanford, and nearly a third of that goes to construction of the plant. Last month, U.S. Rep. Edward J. Markey, D-Mass., demanded that the Energy Department provide an accurate statement of costs and schedule for the facility, and answer questions pertaining to safety complaints.
Markey is a senior member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Dave Huizenga, the DOE's acting assistant secretary for environmental management, said the agency remains committed to building a safe, efficient plant. But he also said technical problems and differences of opinion are not unusual on a project so large and complex.
"We know we have to be really transparent with these issues, and they have to be addressed," he said. "We know the confidence that residents of the Pacific Northwest put in us. That rests with us every day."
The federal government created Hanford from a dusty stretch of land at the height of World War II, when thousands moved to the remote area for a top-secret project to build the atomic bomb. A city of thousands was born, and the site went on to produce plutonium for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan and for the nation's nuclear weapons arsenal throughout the Cold War.
Plutonium production also left behind a slew of waste and debris in trenches, buildings and underground tanks, making Hanford one of the most challenging cleanup projects in the world.
There have been successes in recent years. Spent nuclear fuel was removed from two water-filled pools near the Columbia River, dozens of buried waste sites have been dug up and workers continue to monitor and treat contaminated groundwater.
But the worst of the waste is still decades away from being completely removed. Millions of gallons of a highly radioactive stew — enough to fill dozens of Olympic-size swimming pools — are stored in aging underground tanks. Some of those tanks have leaked, threatening the groundwater and the river.
The plant is being built to convert much of that waste into glasslike logs — a process called vitrification — for permanent disposal underground. A massive undertaking, the plant will stand 12 stories tall and be the size of four football fields once completed, but technical problems have resulted in multiple delays and cost increases.
The price tag already has grown from $4.3 billion to $12.3 billion. The U.S. Department of Energy, which manages Hanford cleanup, recently announced additional costs of at least $800 million, as well as the possibility of additional delays.
The plant is currently scheduled to begin testing in 2019.
The revelations about higher costs and potential delays came as two Hanford workers filed suit as whistleblowers, claiming they were targeted for reprisals after raising safety concerns. The largest of the safety complaints deal with specifications for the process by which the waste would be mixed. The whistleblowers say, as specified, it could result in dangerous gas concentrations as well as a settling of waste within the mixing vessels.
Those issues largely center on a pretreatment building where the worst waste will be funneled before moving on to other parts of the plant. Any problems there would be significant because workers will not be able to enter certain areas once operations commence because of high levels of radioactivity.
Walt Tamosaitis, one of those whistleblowers, estimates the plant will end up costing taxpayers $20 billion because too many questions remain unanswered about the plant's overall design. He said his fear is that the plant, even after all that money, will not operate as it should.
"Congress should grab the Energy Department by the ears," he said. "Change has got to be made so that the plant operates safely and efficiently, which means it completes its mission in 40 years, and the safety culture has to change."
Tamosaitis called for work to stop on the pretreatment portion of the plant until all of the questions can be resolved.
The Energy Department maintains that any questions about gas buildup have been addressed, and a large-scale testing program has been launched to try to resolve the problems with the mixing vessels. Adequate mixing of the waste has been a technical concern for years.
Huizenga said the plant could easily begin operating without an immediate solution to the most troublesome waste, though he conceded that it's possible some waste may have to be mixed elsewhere, before it comes to the plant, which would be an added cost.
He also didn't rule out pausing construction on the plant's pretreatment facility if necessary.
"We're still concerned that we have these issues, and we're continuing to work them every day. We will not operate a facility that cannot be operated safely," he said.
Design of the plant is 85 percent complete, and construction is more than 50 percent complete.
A Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board review earlier this year raised concerns about the treatment of employees who raise safety concerns and recommended changes. The Energy Department's response is due next month.
A more recent report by an independent team of nuclear experts hired by Bechtel found no evidence that the contractor or the Energy Department had suppressed technical dissent by employees.
The number of technical issues that have been raised — and resolved — on the massive project far outnumber those that still remain, said Rick Kacich, Bechtel's assistant project director for integration. And the effort to find the best nuclear experts to review its design, which was created by hundreds of experienced engineers, speaks to the importance Bechtel has placed in the project, he said.
"There's really only one type of issue we can't solve, and that's the issue we don't know about," he said. "We not only encourage people, we expect them to raise questions about a first-of-a-kind facility."
Tom Carpenter of the worker advocacy group Hanford Challenge immediately criticized the latter report, calling it a "soft-pedaling" of the safety concerns.
He said the Energy Department and its contractors are too focused on meeting deadlines and ensuring that the contractors get paid their fees, over the objection of some of their best technical minds.
"It's unfortunate, because this is a plant that needs to work," he said. "We want the plant to work, they want the plant to work, but they're willing to take unacceptable shortcuts and punt to the future while they're building the plant. That's just not acceptable."
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It don't matter what it costs it has to be done. End of story
Let's get this straight.Bechtel is the contractor and they hired a group to address whether the safety/design complaints are valid. Of course they are. Noby will hire a group that will find fault for the group theat hires them.
This is a project that must be done properly. A disaster here would dwarf the problem in Japan.
Wright idea wrong place ( once again ).
Washington state has FOUR ACTIVE VOLCANO'S Helen, Shasta , Hood and RAINER Also active fault lines . What were these people thinking when they approved the site ?????? Is Halaburten through a sub contractor doing the job ????? If so that explanes the huge cost over runs .
The site for the plant is on the property that is being cleaned up. It would be far more costly and dangerous to ship the material in it's current form to a plant offsite. As for the cost issues, this is just one more example of the government failing to adequately oversee how our money is being spent.
@bob1, get a map, Mt Hood and Mt Shasta are in Oregon, who is your information source? Rick Perry? And spelling is important bob1, I could explain why, though I don't think you would "get it" (polite way of saying moron)
Here we have the "brain surgeons" coming out again! For bob1, do you know how many nuclear plants are in that area, government and commercial nuclear, and have had no problems for decades with your misplaced volcanoes? And what does the volcano issue have to do with the new plant?
I could go on and on but that would be like talking to a wall. Build this plant and start the clean up. Those are good jobs for the future and a necessary step to clean up Hanford. Worked there for six years and loved it.
By the way, there were always some whistle blowers out there. Those are usually the clowns that could not hack it.
Bob and URQ,
You both need to get maps. Mt. Shasta is in Northern CA. Mt. Hood is in northwestern OR. Neither are any threat to Hanford. Most of the active faults in WA are near the coast. I don't think the Hanford area has much history of earthquakes. The main problem is the vicinity of Hanford to the Columbia river, and the potential for radioactive contamination of the Columbia river and underground water tables.
Otter96 Finally, someone got the geography right. There is some nasty stuff stored at Hanford, stored in underground tanks which may be seeping. Aside from contaminating the ground water, if it does get into the Columbia, well, let's just say it wouldn't be good. This has been a concern for decades. Why does everything have to become an absolute crisis for our government to act?
@otter96 I apologize, I was thinking Mt Baker near Bend OR at the mention of Mt Shasta, the important thing is that this gets done, and done right, the Columbia River is just too close and for it to get polluted with this stuff would be a well understatement disaster beyond repair. Best Regards Otter, Bill
URQ,
You're right about the need to clean up Hanford, but you still need a map of the NW. Mt. Baker is in northwest WA. Mt. Bachelor is near Bend OR.
Cheers,
Otter
The cost in irrelavent compared to the cost of the environment and human lives. Someone has to be the first to do it so this is a necessary step to move forward if we are to continue to use nuclear energy. The government needs to know when it is doing a wise thing or just another unimportant project. THIS is important. It could convert alot of the waste laying around into harmless product rather then dangerous slug that could break out in the future and cause real damage. Its time to use some common sense...somethings are worth the cost..this would effect our childrens future and the world we leave them.
I wonder what it's going to take for us to realize that the cost of nuclear energy is not worth the benefit? And, I'm not only talking about the financial cost. If we put half the amount we spend on nuclear plants and waste management into research on green sustainable energy, we would have developed economically feasible alternatives by now. Who benefits from spending such vast amounts of money on dirty energy?
Heartlight, I am curious why you think nuclear power is dirty energy. Certainly, there is some waste, but the amount of waste to supply you with all the electricity you will need for the rest of your life, would fit in a cigarette pack. Over the last 26 years, we haven't built any nuke plants so we haven't spent any money there and the ones that have been operating produce more power for less money than conventional plants. They are also cleaner. If you don't believe that, check out some of the research done in the area of the Crystal River nuclear plant. Environmentalists have not been able to find any significant changes in the very environmentally sensitive environment around the plant that they can associate to the nuke plant itself, but they have been able to find changes resulting from the conventional plants built there since the nuke went on-line.
Concerning your statement "If we put half the amount we spend on nuclear plants and waste management into research on green sustainable energy, we would have developed economically feasible alternatives by now" we certainly can't disprove that, can we, but, in fact, that's just wild speculation with nothing to back it up.
All that being said, I am all for alternative energy. I think photo-voltaics will soon be even with power plants on a cost per kilowatt hour basis. I also think that fuel cell technology will begin removing most of us from the grid in the next 25 years.
@Heartlight: You're missing the big picture. We use some 800 terawatt hours of power provided solely from nuclear power in the United States. Green energy is great for supplementing the grid, but we just don't have the ability to generate that much power from green sources without ridiculous measures, e.g. 1.5 million wind turbines or 5,000 sq. miles of high-efficiency solar cells.
Nuclear Waste disposal, the "Dirty Secret" of proponents of Nuclear Power for America, expensive to build
Plants. no insurance company covers it only US Government and expensive disposal. Check Yucca Mountain
Depository.
It seems the problem is easy to fix . A outside source , not hired by the contractors but by the state of washington to approve all plans before moving forward for safety concerns , as well as a open and secure line for workers at site to have their concerns taken into real consideration would do this , It bothers me greatly that we allow someone to check thier own work instead of a outside source that is hired to protect the People not the contractors and their paychecks.
This being said it shall never be done .
Isn't Science wonderful. We work so hard to find better and better ways to destroy ourselves and our planet.
40 years ago I stood up and stated that we shouldn't get into this business until we knew how to dispose of radioactive waste. As I was told then, through the 40 years and as we're told today, it will get solved.
I didn't believe them 40 years ago. I don't believe them now.
Retired Nuclear Power Engineer.
The easiest way to deal with nuclear waste is to drill down two or three miles into the Earth's crust, and then start drilling horizontal tunnels outward (in layers) coming back up. You can actually bomb your way down using reusable shaped charge industrial bombs. We will then simply use robotics to put this solidified nuclear waste into each one of these dual air locked horizontal side tunnels, and then fill the space between these airlocks with concrete once each of these side tunnels are full. A double walled pipe system will bleed nuclear waste gases to the surface for treatment. Once you have used 'state of the art' drilling equipment to drill as many horizontal side tunnels as you possibly can off of each vertical shaft, you will then permanently fill and seal the vertical shaft, and the nuclear waste should be permanently sequestered as long as you have selected the right geologic location. You can even select a geologic location which will one day be subducted down into the interior of the Earth. - Rick Carter
I have also proposed an alternate system of dealing with nuclear waste, by first treating the nuclear waste to solidify it, and then modestly encapsulating it for deep sea burial. The idea is to use undersea active volcanoes to permanently sequester this nuclear waste by first using undersea robotics to jet these canisters of nuclear waste into the ocean bottom around the base of these undersea active volcanoes, and then allow these growing active undersea volcano cones to permanently cover this nuclear waste with lava flows. There are many hundreds of active undersea volcanoes to potentially choose from around the world. - Rick Carter
(Please keep in mind that there are serious problems with exploding rock once you get down very deep into the Earth, due to the enormous pressures from all the earth above. So it is only practical to go down just so deep into the Earth to sequester this nuclear waste, unless you are going to use a nuclear device to create an enormous cavern deep inside the Earth for sequestering this nuclear waste.) - RC
If you are going to use a nuclear device to create an enormous cavern deep inside the Earth for permanently sequestering nuclear waste (actually a VERY GOOD idea), you would first drill a shaft down about a yard or two in diameter, and then lower this nuclear device down to the bottom. You would then fill up the shaft which you have dug and explode the nuclear device. Once you have allowed the cavern created by this nuclear blast to properly cool down, you would then dig a second shaft down to connect with this cavern, which you could then dump your nuclear waste into. As I pointed out before, you could actually do this in a subduction zone which will eventually subduct all of this nuclear waste into the Earth's interior. - Rick Carter
Personally, I prefer to burn up most of our nuclear waste in the future as nuclear fuel, inside of hybrid nuclear / thermonuclear power plants which for the most part would rely upon thorium and depleted uranium for nuclear (breeder) fuel. - RC
PSx2 - In the future we need to design our reactor cores so they can be decommissioned by transporting them as intact units out into the deep ocean, and lowering them down into large deep holes which we have robotically dug into the ocean floor. If we start using cellularized grid mini reactor systems this should not be too difficult. - RC
The nice thing about hybrid nuclear / thermonuclear power plants is that any runaway reaction is absolutely impossible. These power plants can be totally shut down by the simple flip of a switch, even though there will still be a short cool down period following shutdown. In addition, it is relatively easy to protect mini reactor systems from the effects of an earthquake, since it is relatively easy to construct them on floating or moving foundations, so you can actually put them almost anywhere. - RC
(Sadly, the majority of Americans are religiously programmed to believe that our country and our world are both supposed to end soon, so they can supposedly see their Messiah, Christ, or 12th Imam return to rule our planet as a totalitarian theocracy. As a result, much of the vision and imagination in this country seems to have completely evaporated or shut down. What a truly sad state of affairs this is for our once proud and prosperous nation.) - RC
Rick, I'm an Electrical Engineer that has worked on projects with some nuclear material involvement. The biggest problem that bothered me was that everyone seemed happy to leave disposal problems up in the air. "That will be taken care of by then" or "They can just store the material until they have a better solution." I was never happy with that half a**ed answer. Why would nobody solve the real engineering problem? There was a solution to reprocess spent fuel rods and a plant was build at great cost. Problem then was that no local govt. entities would allow shipment of spent rods to the processing plant. Trucks over highways nor trains were considered safe or secure enough. We now have ditches of spent fuel rods stored at nuclear power plants resulting in environmental risks and security nightmares. This is the same as the setup the caused the first releases from the Tsunami in Japan.
I'm still against nuclear power, because there is no workable solution to the engineering problem in place. I feel the same about energy sources- analyze the whole problem: from source to include disposal. Then compare them and choose.
@Rick: Thorium is being looked into, but what we need is a closed fuel cycle like the have in France. We could simply use MOX fuels by reprocessing the "waste" and extending the burn-up.
Thorium is an interesting species, if we can reach higher burn-ups (like in HWRs) but we still have the cladding problem -- which is actually what I do research on.
Why don't we just fly over pakistan and dump the stuff from the air, that place couldn't get any worse.
Gee, Bechtel, that sounds familiar, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=6975 , there has been problems in other areas. Bechtel had close connections with Bush administration, check out above link, a must read. Begs the question, what about the other bidders, if there were others? Maybe NO BID. Sounds like another money pit.
what is being dealt with,in all truthfullness,is a chemical,deadly by it's own accord,a chemical hazard when first discovered,should,as we have known for decades,never should've been used to end ww2,as it's peoples
of hiroshima,nagasaki & bikini,to this very days,decades after,suffer yet from that which is inevitable,radiation
death. should a granchild of a hiroshima survivor desire to marry,raise a family,as such this person is considered poisened,refused,as grandchildren of this manmade tradgedy suffer physical abnormalties.do nottry to outsmart natural order is thelesson learned. nuclear winter has long been upon us,as cows in oz
eat radioactive grass by the u.k. long ago above ground testing,same with the irish sea from cliffs of dover
nuke bomb tests..face it,we're goners
i admire the mind of man,imagining it can circumvate from all things sedate,all things normal,as normal is what only nature is. this globe upon which we ride does have it's limits,in terms as to exactly how far we care to discover earths physical limits. when is enough radiation enough is the question,a matter i have not yet heard being humanely discussed. man,in time,will destroy this place called earth.question is....when.?
were breathing nuclear winters air for half a century. breathe on people breathe on.
Bury it all in the Capitol Building. We know it's at least sound proof. They haven't heard a word the American people have said in years
oner... Love your post!
What in the world ever happened to American education ??? The American people are truly in a very sad state of affairs. The jumbled and ill informed thinking of the average American is absolutely appalling. - RC
Well the whole area is a done deal based on what's across the border in Umatilla, OR.
Hey jerk off, get your facts straight. The Umatilla base built a facility to destroy what's there. Been doing it for years now. Soon it will be gone. Your apocalyptic visions won't happen. Go back to bed.
Why the FEDS? Lets follow the GOP nominees' lead here and put this on the states that use nuclear energy. According to Perry and the gang of six... the states can take care of themselves.... so let them!
Tidal power does not create nuclear waste. Why aren't we using this non-polluting renewable source of energy????
Transmission of the produced energy, costs of maintenance, and harm to sea life. Got any other questions?
800 TWh (terawatt-hours).
Most of the opposition to nuclear power doesn't know what the h3ll they are talking about. The opposition to nuclear is hysteria of the highest order. That includes the reporting on this story. Our legislators are for the most part morons, that have to listen to other morons voice their concerns. Nuclear is the only way to produce the energy 7 billion people need for the future. Period.
It's maddening that we haven't build a new plant since the 70's. I know why we're still using Gen I&II technology when we could be building and using Gen IV reactors: Cost-prohibitive measures.
Groups that are anti-nuclear (whether afraid of the proven technology, or simply of the NIMBY kind) have found a very efficient tool to prevent construction -- they demand all sorts of impact studies and environmental analyses and such, and the cost of construction balloons to the point where companies cannot afford to build them.
Private contractors cleaned up Rocky Flats, why can't they clean up Hanford and the Arco site too?
Why "store" it. Simply design other plants to use the "spent" rods. Certainly if we put men on the Moon there is a way to use the "spent" rods rather than just burying them and letting another generation worry about them?