Hanford Officials Confident About Project
Hanford officials said Wednesday they are confident that problems with an experimental waste-disposal method at a former Ohio uranium processing plant won’t be repeated at the Washington nuclear reservation.
Last week, $54 million worth of contracts was awarded for a similar project at Hanford.
But activist Gerald Pollet of Seattle-based Heart of America Northwest was skeptical that the two new contracting teams at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation could do better since each has members who were involved in the Fernald project.
“No one seems to talk about the house of cards that is created relying on the same company over and over again even after there’s significant questions about their performance,” Pollet said.
Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary last Wednesday awarded contracts to two teams - one led by BNFL Inc., the other by Lockheed Martin Advanced Environmental Systems - to build commercial pilot plants to transform waste currently stored in underground tanks into glass-like logs. The process, known as vitrification, is believed to provide a less volatile method of storing the waste.
Hanford, which produced plutonium for the U.S. nuclear arsenal for four decades, now is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site. Cleanup is expected to take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.
At Fernald, where the waste is being encapsulated into glass-like marbles, not logs, the vitrification plant designed to handle 20 million pounds of radioactive sludge has had numerous problems, Energy Department spokesman Gary Stegner said.
“It is working to an extent,” he said. “But it’s working in an inconsistent way. There are problems with some of the equipment… There’s no really good sustained operation of that facility.”
Meanwhile, the Cincinnati Enquirer reported this week that Fluor Daniel Fernald’s president, John Bradburne, on Aug. 15 wrote Fernald site manager Jack Craig that the company was considering changing or scrapping the vitrification project because of “equipment reliability uncertainty” in the pilot plant’s operation.
The Fernald Feed Materials Production center, a 1,050-acre site 18 miles northwest of Cincinnati, processed uranium ore and thorium as part of the nation’s nuclear weapons program from 1951 until 1989. Cleanup at the site began in 1989.