I hope more progress is made at the Hanford site in the next decade than in the last.

The Hanford nuclear facility in Washington State is one of the more infamous sites in the United States’ atomic history. Built during the Manhattan Project for the production of plutonium, Hanford played a critical role in the American nuclear program from the Trinity test well into the Cold War. Today, 54 million gallons of radioactive waste from those decades of plutonium production is stored in 177 underground tanks at the site. More than sixty of those tanks are known to be leaking into the surrounding soil. It is hardly a permanent solution.

Over a decade ago, the Department of Energy decided that the best way to reduce the leakage of waste was to build an onsite vitrification plant, where the toxic sludge could be converted into easily stored and transported glass logs. These would still be radioactive, but much less volatile and likely to leak into the environment. The actual construction however, has not moved along as planned.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers performed a budget assessment on the partially constructed Hanford vitrification plant, and estimated it would take $12.2 billion to complete, not including the fee for the contractor, Bechtel. The sheer size of this budget might cause sticker shock in the casual observer, but sadly it is only the latest pitfall in the troubled history of the Hanford vitrification project.

The plant was originally slated to be built by BNFL. But after a number of setbacks, including a revised budget projection of $13 billion, $6 billion more than BNFL’s previous estimate, the Department of Energy fired BNFL from the project back in 2000.

With a revised Department of Energy budget estimate of $4.3 billion in hand, construction giant Bechtel took over the contract. Complaints of cost overruns and internal discord about design safety soon built up, and earlier this year Bechtel had to halt construction in several areas due to design problems. Company whistleblowers revealed that much of the construction was taking place without finalized designs or blueprints, and that some of the foundations that had been lain were not designed adequately for potential earthquakes. Bechtel relented, and slowed construction to address many of these claims, but all that wasted time and money only added to the total cost. The end result of these and other setbacks is the Corps’ recent $12.2 billion price tag.

Aside from the sad irony of arriving back at nearly the same price after six years of haggling and construction, there are once again rumblings about a contractor pulling a bait and switch with the budget at Hanford, and the Department of Energy’s tendency to lowball the cost.

The Hanford plant seems destined to join the pantheon of the other troubled and stalled visionary public works and reconstruction projects of our day. In fact, it hardly feels premature to list it alongside Boston’s Big Dig, the rebuilding of New Orleans and the whole Iraqi reconstruction that never really got going. (I make no comment on the frequency of Bechtel’s participation in that list).

But unlike those other projects, Hanford isn’t just radioactive in the political sense. The environmental damage at Hanford has been documented for years, and if any significant amount of that leaking waste finds it’s way into the groundwater flowing into the nearby Columbia River, it’s game over. The Hanford site lost it’s luster as an achievement of the atomic age long ago and has become just another Cold War embarrassment, a scar on the landscape that the American public tries to forget. But there are greater things at risk here than politics, money and public opinion.

September 27, 2006

I think it would be appropriate to point out the revised BNFL estimate included the cost to finance the construction project. While it would have been 14 billion under BNFL, fully 1/2 of that cost was financing the effort. In addition, BNFl would have been paid by the log, that is, they would have received no payment until they produced a product. So, in the meantime, we the taxpayers are looking at a project that actually will cost us at least double what BNFL was going to charge.

You may have also wished to add to the list of cost overruns the Yucca Mountain project. Guess who is in charge of that?

Peter McMillin