Officials Release Nuke Plan Two Plants Would Be Built To Treat Radioactive Waste

State and federal officials have approved a plan for building commercial plants to treat dangerous nuclear wastes from underground tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Two demonstration plants would be built to treat the 56 million gallons of highly radioactive and chemically toxic defense wastes, according to the final environmental impact statement, written jointly by the U.S. Energy Department and the state Department of Ecology and released Thursday.

One plant would separate the wastes based on health and environmental risk, while the other would incorporate them into less volatile glass-like logs through a process called vitrification.

Building each of the plants would cost about $500 million over the next six years, the DOE has estimated. Most of that cost will be borne by the private companies, which would be paid for the services they provide.

Ecology spokesman Jerry Gilliland said his agency considers this the best way to handle the tank wastes.

“We think it may be the path that gets us to vitrification instead of studies of vitrification and gets us to dealing with the waste instead of talking about the waste,” Gilliland said in a telephone interview from his Olympia office.

By privatizing, the DOE hopes to save 25 percent to 30 percent of the estimated $40 billion it would cost the government to build and operate its own vitrification plants, officials said.

“To do something like this on the scale that we would have to do here would essentially break the piggy bank,” said DOE spokesman Guy Schein, explaining why the DOE decided to find private companies to build the plants.

The contracts are expected to be awarded next month.

The 177 buried tanks, some of which are leaking, contain 240,000 metric tons of radioactive wastes from plutonium processing. The contents of some of the tanks are not known and several of them have been subject to heat buildup, requiring complicated venting of flammable gases.

Under the plan released Thursday, the first wastes would be removed from tanks by late 2001 and the project will be completed by 2028, Schein said.

The Energy Department has already put aside $185 million from its $1.66 billion budget for fiscal 1997, which begins Oct. 1, to reassure potential contractors that the agency is serious about the project.

The government intends to eventually use the $185 million to pay for the glass logs. But if the DOE breaks its contracts and decides against vitrification, the money would be used to reimburse the companies for their expenditures.

“That’s not going to happen,” Schein said.