Waste Tank Program Under Scrutiny Despite Delay In Schedule, Hanford Says Study Coming Along

State environmental watchdogs are worried about the ability of a Hanford nuclear reservation contractor to study the contents of underground waste tanks, but said the program appears to be turning the corner.

Westinghouse Hanford Co., the prime contractor at the federal reservation near Richland, is well behind schedule for studying the contents of 177 underground waste storage tanks.

Characterization of the tanks’ contents is vital to plans to clean up Hanford’s radioactive and hazardous chemical wastes, said Jerry Gilliland, spokesman for the state Department of Ecology.

A pending Government Accounting Office report criticizes Westinghouse Hanford for failing to meet an October 1995 deadline for a Department of Defense safety report on the tanks.

Westinghouse officials on Wednesday admitted their efforts are lagging to identity and classify the tanks’ radioactive and chemical brews, but said the program has recently improved.

The program has already cost $250 million, placing Westinghouse under intense pressure to improve its performance.

Characterization of the wastes by December 1999 is a major milestone in a tri-party cleanup agreement between the state and two federal agencies.

A draft GAO report concludes Westinghouse has completed only 42 core samples during the past five years and is not expected to finish the sampling until at least 2001.

“What we’ve been saying is there definitely have been problems with tank characterization,” Gilliland said Friday from Olympia. “They are behind (Tri-Party Agreement) deadlines and it’s a major issue with us. Characterization has to be done before the tanks can be cleaned out.”

“We are quite worried about it,” Gilliland said. “But our technical people feel they have turned a corner and they are on the way to solving their problems.”

Plans call for encapsulating the dangerous tank wastes in glass-like logs through a process called vitrification. The logs then would be shipped to an underground repository for permanent storage.

Toby Michelena, Ecology’s tank waste project manager, said characterization is a very difficult and expensive process that has foundered on technical and process problems.

“We fully expect them to complete the characterization required by the agreement by December 1999,” Michelena said.

“While they’ve had a lot of problems in the past, and even recently, they are starting to turn the corner and having some improvements,” he said.

State and federal regulators should get a better picture in September of Westinghouse efforts to catch up. That is when the company is required to submit characterization studies on 40 more tanks.

Ronald E. Lerch, Westinghouse’s deputy director for tank waste remediation, said Wednesday the company underestimated the technical difficulty of getting samples out of the tanks.

But he said Westinghouse has improved its sampling rate in recent months and should be able to produce about five samples a month from now on.

Michelena said core sampling, in which a probe is pushed or drilled into wastes from the top to bottom of the 1-million-gallon underground steel tanks, is but one way of characterizing the wastes.

Such studies can be as simple as scooping portions of the tanks contents, and analyzing gas, liquid or vapor samples, he said.

“We want to use all of those, and core sampling is critical, but not the only one,” he said. “Core sampling is technically difficult and fairly expensive. We want to make sure we are using our resources wisely.”