Hanford Plan Worries Advisory Board Panel Says Doe Plan For Private Cleanup Leaves Too Many Unanswered Questions

The Hanford Advisory Board is concerned about the Energy Department’s plan to privatize tank-waste treatment at the Hanford nuclear reservation, members said Thursday.

“We simply don’t have enough data from DOE to make sound decisions, meaning there’s lots of questions left unanswered,” said board member Todd Martin of the Spokane-based Hanford Education Action League.

Martin laid out a number of the board’s questions and criticized the lack of information from the agency.

Under the privatization proposal, the department would accept bids for two low-level-waste vitrification facilities. The private companies would use their own money to build the plants, which would melt radioactive waste into glass logs that would be buried. DOE would pay for every waste log produced.

The two facilities would provide “proof of concept,” ensuring that the technology - which has not been used in exactly this way before - actually works.

About 3 percent of the 240,000 metric tons of waste being held at Hanford would be processed during this phase, said Don Veith, DOE’s senior technical adviser on the Tank Waste Remediation System.

After the initial facilities prove the concept works, two to four larger facilities would be built to process the rest of the waste.

Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary is expected to announced her decision on the plan next month.

Meanwhile, Martin said, it isn’t clear whether the proposal is sound from either a budgetary or a technical standpoint.

“In my opinion, what this does is shift the cost to the next generation of bureaucrats. And we all know how well the DOE does that,” he said.

Veith argued that privatization would be cheaper than the current system, in which the DOE builds a facility and then pays a contractor to run it.

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