Hanford bill up to $12.2 billion
YAKIMA – The cost to build a massive waste treatment plant at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation rose to $12.2 billion Thursday, as the U.S. Department of Energy announced the results of a review by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The new estimate does not include any fee to be paid to Bechtel National, the contractor hired to build the plant at the highly contaminated site.
The vitrification plant is being built to convert millions of gallons of radioactive waste to glasslike logs for permanent disposal in a nuclear waste repository. The plant has long been considered the cornerstone of cleanup at the Hanford site, but the project has been mired in cost overruns, construction problems and delays.
In 2000, the construction cost was estimated at $4.3 billion. In May, the Energy Department announced a new cost estimate of $11.55 billion. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman ordered a full review of that estimate by the Army Corps of Engineers.
The corps review released Thursday projects the cost at $12.2 billion – $9.1 billion in base cost and $3.1 billion in contingency money to cover unknown costs.
The new review adds $650 million to the overall project cost, including $320 million to cover potential fluctuations in labor rates and $330 million in contingency money.
The review also extends the projected completion date by three months to November 2019, even further past the 2011 legal deadline established under the Tri-Party Agreement, a cleanup pact signed by Washington state, the Energy Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
The operating date already has been pushed back three times from the original 1999 deadline.
“We have had early and often discussions with the state on our milestones and what this may reflect. One of those biggest issues is making sure we have a plant that is very credible in its delivery, and that we are committed to doing that,” said Charlie Anderson, assistant deputy secretary for environmental management at the Energy Department.
Discussions with the state and regulators to renegotiate the Tri-Party Agreement will continue, Anderson said.
The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Today, it is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, with cleanup costs expected to total as much as $60 billion.
Key to the cleanup is the removal of 53 million gallons of toxic, radioactive waste from 177 aging underground tanks. Dozens of the tanks have leaked into the groundwater, threatening the nearby Columbia River and making construction of the one-of-a-kind vitrification plant a priority.
Gov. Chris Gregoire has threatened to sue the federal government if Congress does not continue to fully fund the project.