Two New Teams To Take Over Cleanup Of Hanford Tanks Again, Performance Will Be Key To Payment, Official Says

Officials at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation say they expect to conclude negotiations by the end of the month with two consortiums that will take over cleanup of the site’s leaky storage tanks.

And like the contract awarded earlier this week for management of the reservation, the pending agreements would force the operators to perform or face withheld payments, said William Taylor, the director of the U.S. Department of Energy Waste Disposal Division at Hanford.

The teams are led by Lockheed Martin and British Nuclear Fuel Ltd. Both include members with nuclear waste remediation experience.

Fluor Daniel, which won the $4.9 billion management contract, is a member of the Lockheed Martin team.

Taylor said the department has paid other contractors hundreds of millions of dollars in mostly futile efforts to treat the radioactive liquids and sludges that have accumulated beneath Hanford’s sagebrush as a byproduct of plutonium production.

Some of the 177 tanks are leaking their contents into underlying aquifers.

Taylor declined to discuss the total cost of the tank cleanup until talks with the prospective contractors are completed, but said some structures already on site will be used by the new teams.

Previous cost estimates have run as high as $40 billion.

Taylor said the contractors will be paid by the ton for waste treated and immobilized according to department specifications.

Low-level but encapsulated waste will go back into the ground at Hanford, he said, while more toxic material will be shipped to the Yucca Mountain depository in Nevada.

Taylor said the tanks hold 240,000 metric tons of material with 250 million curies of radioactivity, an amount he characterized as “humongous.”

Privatizing the cleanup effort, he said, will speed the process by an estimated four years, allowing the department to meet its commitment to Washington to complete the task by the year 2028.

“We need to get on with this program,” Taylor said. “We were not progressing at a reasonable pace.”

, DataTimes