Hanford Official Tries To Convince Delegation Privatization Will Work Funding Latest Wrinkle In Bid To Turn Radioactive Waste Into Glass

A group of congressional aides toured the Hanford Nuclear Reservation this week to learn about plans to convert some of the deadliest radioactive wastes into glass.

Much of the briefing focused on how the $4 billion project will be funded.

The U.S. Department of Energy wants to hire two corporate teams to build plants to convert at least 6 percent of Hanford’s 55 million gallons of highly radioactive liquid wastes into glass by 2007.

The new wrinkle over conventional government contracts is that neither team would be paid a cent until the wastes are glassified, beginning in 2002.

But Mike Jarvis, aide to U.S. Rep. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., complained DOE’s estimates of how much it needs for the project appear to change constantly.

David Cherington, aide to U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich., said Congress has trouble funding a program where many details are still up in the air.

A major problem is a similar privatization effort at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory’s Pit 9.

Lockheed Martin Advanced Environmental Systems was hired to clean a waste-filled acre at the Idaho site under a $179 million privatization contract. But the price nearly doubled to $337 million, spooking Congress on the privatization concept.

That left Hanford official Bill Taylor, head of the Department of Energy’s tank waste privatization effort, with some tough questions from 16 congressional aides who toured the nuclear site Thursday and Friday.

Taylor outlined what DOE believes are the differences between the Hanford and Pit 9 projects. These include:

Pit 9 was set up so Lockheed received payments as the project was built and tested. The Hanford contract won’t pay anything until glass logs are produced.

DOE financed Pit 9. The Hanford projects would be privately funded, to be eventually reimbursed by DOE. Taylor said that means Wall Street investors would bring extra pressure to keep costs down.

Hanford’s wastes are supposedly better analyzed and understood than Pit 9’s wastes.

“We have learned some very serious lessons (at Pit 9), and so has DOE,” said Bill Dixon, director of regulatory affairs for Lockheed’s Hanford team.

The challenge at Hanford will be on the business side, Dixon added. “The business and financing aspects of this are what’s going to make or break it,” he said.

Hanford for more than four decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons and now contains the nation’s highest volume of radioactive defense wastes.