50-50 chance of accident at Hanford, report says

YAKIMA – The waste treatment plant under construction at south-central Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Reservation has a 50 percent chance of a chemical or radiological accident, according to a paper to be published this fall.

The paper was based on a 3-year-old study by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. For that reason, the U.S. Department of Energy said Tuesday that the information used to prepare the paper is outdated and that the plant poses no significant risk of a major accident.

Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and a former adviser to the Clinton administration, prepared the paper in collaboration with a nonprofit watchdog group, the Government Accountability Project. GAP says the peer-reviewed paper will be published in the fall 2004 issue of Princeton University’s Science and Global Security magazine.

The 2001 NRC study concluded there was a 50-50 risk of major radiological and chemical accidents at Hanford’s high-level waste plant over an estimated 28 years of operation, Alvarez wrote. “A major accident might render a large portion of land uninhabitable for centuries and effectively poison the Columbia River,” he said in a GAP news release.

For 40 years, the Hanford reservation made plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. Today, work there centers on a $50 billion to $60 billion cleanup, to be finished by 2035.

Much of the cleanup involves treating 53 million gallons of highly radioactive waste from World War II and Cold War-era plutonium production. The waste sits in 177 aging underground tanks at Hanford, less than 10 miles from the Columbia River.

The waste treatment plant will use a process called vitrification to turn most of the waste into glass logs for permanent disposal in a nuclear waste repository. It is the government’s largest construction project.

The plant is being designed as it is being built, which has resulted in significant cost overruns. Construction was estimated at $4.35 billion before the contract was awarded in 2000. The current estimate is close to $5.7 billion, an increase of more than 30 percent.

But at the time of the 2001 NRC report assessing safety risks, only 10 percent of the plant design was complete, said John Eschenberg, project manager for the Energy Department’s Office of River Protection.

Since then, architects have analyzed scenarios for potential accidents and designed the building in such a manner as to prevent them from occurring, he said.

Chances for a severe accident now stand at less than 1 in a million, he said.