Hanford’S Risks Increase Due To Delays Epa Audit Says Regulators Fail To Enforce Deadlines, Adding Years To Cleanup Project
State and federal regulators have failed to enforce deadlines to stabilize Hanford’s highly radioactive underground tanks.
Major delays in pumping and treating Hanford’s most dangerous wastes could extend the nation’s costliest nuclear cleanup as much as 19 years beyond its original 2028 deadline, says a yearlong audit by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general.
The delays “significantly increase” the risk of a release of radiation and chemicals from the old, compromised tanks into the ground water or air of Eastern Washington, the report says.
EPA Regional Inspector General Truman Beeler, the agency’s lead investigator in the West, filed his internal report in March. It was obtained by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a whistleblowers group with offices in Washington, D.C., and Olympia, through a recent public records request.
The report calls on EPA to place a high priority on the Hanford tanks to keep the $50 billion nuclear cleanup on track.
It slams the Washington Department of Ecology and EPA’s regional office in Seattle for lax enforcement at Hanford - and calls on the regulators to speed cleanup to protect public health and safety.
The U.S. Department of Energy, the federal agency that runs Hanford, also shares in the blame, the report says. It notes DOE has inadequately funded treatment of the tank problems and has repeatedly missed deadlines to address their hazards.
Ecology and EPA officials say they agree with the EPA inspector general and are working to improve their oversight.
“We concur in full with both the facts as presented in each finding and with the associated recommendations,” said EPA’s Richard Albright and Ecology’s Mike Wilson in a joint letter to Beeler.
“There’s no question we are facing big delays out there, due in part to funding and in part to DOE having drug its feet,” Wilson said Friday.
The EPA audit “didn’t tell us a lot we didn’t already know, but we hope it draws attention to the frustrations we face. It also points out things we could do better, and we are addressing those issues,” he said.
Officials from Hanford’s Office of River Protection, which oversees the tanks, weren’t available Friday to respond to the audit, a DOE spokesman said.
Skeptical Hanford-watchers are waiting to see results.
“The key now is whether Ecology will take action to correct the problems identified by the audit,” said Lea Mitchell, Olympia director of PEER.
The audit was conducted from November 1998 to January 2000. It zeroes in on Hanford’s 177 large underground tanks that store 60 percent of the government’s most lethally radioactive bomb wastes, leftovers from the Cold War arms race.
At least 1 million gallons of highly toxic and radioactive waste in 67 of Hanford’s 149 single-wall tanks has already leaked, and some has reached ground water.
The single-wall tanks were built from the 1940s through the ‘60s and had a design life of approximately 20 years. Some 58 of the old tanks don’t have effective leak-detection systems, the report says.
It also notes the 28 newer double-shell tanks will exceed their design life by 2028 - Hanford’s original cleanup deadline.
Any tank leaks, plus billions of gallons of more diluted contaminants poured into the ground since 1945, “could reach the Columbia River in as little as 20 years and continue for the next 5,000 years,” the report says.
The audit identified a series of delays and management failures that have jeopardized several important cleanup goals. Among its findings:
Ecology has the lead responsibility to enforce federal hazardous waste laws at Hanford, but has failed to compel Hanford to meet firm deadlines.
As a result, plans to stabilize the most fragile, single-wall tanks have been delayed nine years, from September 1995 to September 2004.
Most of the delays have to do with figuring out how to tame gases that cause some of the old tanks to belch and rumble and understanding other chemical reactions inside the tanks.
A date to start treating the tank contents, separating them into low-radiation and high-radiation wastes for eventual conversion to benign glass logs for storage and disposal, has been delayed eight years to September 2007.
That deadline may slip further because of recent problems with Hanford’s radioactive waste glassification program.
BNFL Inc., the British company in charge of a team of contractors working to design the plants to convert the wastes to glass, was terminated this spring after submitting a $15.2 billion estimate to DOE - drastically higher than its original $6.9 billion estimate.
Now, with a 2001 legal deadline to start construction on the glass plant, DOE is left with no contractor and a partial design. Hanford’s tank farm contractor CH2M Hill will supervise the project for the rest of 2000.
Final treatment of all the tank wastes will take up to 19 years longer than predicted - possibly until 2047 - the inspector general’s report says.
Ecology hasn’t resolved flammable gas safety hazards in the tanks and was slow to flag a serious hydrogen gas buildup in one of the most dangerous vessels, the double-shell tank SY-101.
The 1-million-gallon tank held some of the most concentrated wastes stored at Hanford and has been on Hanford’s “watch list” of worst tanks since January 1991.
At least 25 tanks are estimated to be generating enough hydrogen gas to cause a fire if ignited, the report says.
If that happened, “there is the potential for up to 22 latent cancer fatalities from direct radiation and inhalation of radioactive contaminants. The longer the waste remains in the tanks, the higher the probability that a hydrogen gas fire would occur,” the report says.
Ecology could have moved faster on the hydrogen gas problem at SY-101, but left a safety job empty for over a year, the audit says.
Ecology didn’t ignore safety while the position stayed dark, Wilson said. It was finally filled in April.
Ecology and a panel of national experts convened by DOE have made major progress recently with SY-101, said Tony Valero, Ecology’s tank waste storage manager in Kennewick.
Based on the experts’ recommendations, a 10-foot crust growing inside the tank was broken up this spring, allowing the hydrogen gas trapped beneath the crust to vent safely.
Also, 600,000 gallons of the tank’s contents have been transferred to another tank, and the remaining 400,000 gallons have been diluted with water and are being observed through the middle of this month.
“The goal is to remove this tank from the watch list. It has definitely been a success story,” Valero said.
Ecology has also failed to conduct adequate safety inspections on the tanks.
Only 39 of the 177 tanks have been inspected in the past seven years - even though many more have “serious compliance issues” and federal hazardous waste law requires annual inspections of each tank, the report says.
Ecology plans to step up its tank inspections and leak detection efforts this year, Wilson said. He said Ecology had been spending its time on efforts to upgrade the worst problem tanks, rather than on inspecting every tank.
“We are really pushing now to get the (glass) plant up and running. Our goal is to get the waste out of the ground,” Wilson said.
EPA Region 10 shares in the blame for the tank enforcement delays because it hasn’t pushed Ecology to enforce federal hazardous waste laws, according to the audit.
As a consequence, both the single-shell and double-shell tanks will have to be used “significantly beyond” deadlines established in an August 1999 U.S. District Court-supervised consent order governing Hanford cleanup, the report says.
“DOE’s history of poor performance, the significance of the environmental problems … and the cost of the cleanup program” necessitate better management, it notes.
Since the audit, Ecology has asked EPA to back up state enforcement actions “to help counter DOE resistance,” Wilson said.
On June 13, Ecology fined DOE $200,000 for its failure to complete an evaluation of the integrity of the double-walled storage tanks. That task was supposed to be finished last September.
As it has done with other missed cleanup deadlines, DOE is appealing the fine to the state Pollution Control Hearings Board.