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Heart of America Wants to Slow Vit Plant Building

Posted on: Thursday, 2 February 2006, 15:00 CST

By Annette Cary, Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash.

Feb. 2--A Hanford watchdog group is calling for no more money to be spent on construction on key parts of the vitrification plant until problems are solved.

The Heart of America Northwest report was released just days before the Bush administration is scheduled to send its proposed fiscal year 2007 budget for Hanford and the vitrification plant to Congress. It also comes the week that a producer from the 60 Minutes television news program has been visiting the plant in preparation for a possible story on its problems.

The Heart of America message is at odds with the plan being pushed by state and congressional leaders who say full funding of $690 million a year for the plant is critical.

"It's a huge mistake to be advocating a slowdown," said Jay Manning, director of the Washington State Department of Ecology.

Some members of Congress are interested not just in underfunding the plant, but ending funding completely, and the report could help justify that, he said.

But Gerald Pollet, executive director of Heart of America Northwest, said he believes the halt to construction could be part of a plan to get the project on schedule and control costs.

"Continuing to provide U.S. DOE and Hanford contractors with $690 million per year for the vitrification plant is enabling stupidity," said the Heart of America proposal.

Pollet wants construction on the two parts of the plant that would handle radioactive waste -- the Pretreatment Facility and the High-Level Waste Facility -- halted until their design is completed. Then, he wants the design and costs validated -- which would be based in part on pilot-scale tests -- before more money is spent on their construction.

Construction would not proceed until the Department of Energy knew the project would work, which might take years.

But Pollet believes his proposed plan could answer vital questions about whether the plant will be able to safely turn radioactive waste into a glass form that protects the environment. It also would solve problems caused by construction starting before most of the design had been completed, according to Heart of America.

Heart of America is calling for other changes before the construction resumes, including management and contract reforms, independent safety regulation and concrete plans for treating all the low-activity radioactive waste.

Pollet emphasized the plan does not call for stopping construction on parts of the plant that would treat low-activity radioactive waste. He believes treatment could begin before the rest of the plant is finished.

The vitrification plant is planned to turn much of the 53 million gallons held in underground tanks into a stable glass form for permanent disposal. But it has not been designed to treat all of the waste left from the past production of plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program by a legal deadline of 2028.

The project was plagued by problems in 2005. The design standard had to be revised to make sure parts of the plant could withstand a severe earthquake. That and other problems increased the cost of the plant from $5.8 billion to potentially as much as $9.6 billion and gave the Department of Energy no way to start operations by a legal deadline of 2011.

Congress reacted by cutting funding from the $690 million per year planned at the start of construction to $526 million for fiscal year 2006. About 1,700 workers were laid off during the past year, and construction has temporarily stopped on the High Level Waste Facility and the Pretreatment Facility with plans to resume building late in the year.

With the budget cuts added to other problems at the plant, the state is estimating that the plant might not begin treating waste until 2018, seven years past the legal deadline.

Not just Heart of America, but also the Government Accountability Office, has questioned the wisdom of proceeding with building while the design still was being developed.

However, DOE decided that the substantial savings in time and money were worth the risk. The plant includes some technologies that have been widely used in industry and others that have been tested at half or full scale, but no vitrification plant of its size has been built before.

Gov. Chris Gregoire and U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., have urged the Bush administration in recent days to restore funding for the vitrification plant to $690 million, the amount on which long-term construction plans were based. U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., sent a letter to President Bush on Wednesday, calling for adequate funding for the federal government to meet its obligations for Hanford cleanup.

Any slowdown in construction can only add to the plant's costs, Manning said.

"The technology at issue here is the right technology," he said. "It is the right plant. We just need the guts to finish it."

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Copyright (c) 2006, Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash.

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Source: Tri-City Herald

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