High Accident Risk Is Seen in Atomic Waste Project

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/27/national/27nuke.html?th

 

July 27, 2004

High Accident Risk Is Seen in Atomic Waste Project

By MATTHEW L. WALD

 

WASHINGTON, July 26 - An Energy Department plant under

construction in Hanford, Wash., that is designed to

remove highly radioactive waste from leaking tanks and

immobilize it in glass has a 50 percent chance of a

major accident over its 28-year lifetime, according to

an independent government audit.

 

The audit, which drew little notice when issued three

years ago by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has

recently gained prominence through the efforts of

Robert Alvarez, an adviser to the energy secretary in

the Clinton administration.

 

The regulatory commission, whose report cited several

design problems, was the last outside agency to

perform an in-depth engineering review of the project.

Since then, the Energy Department has altered the

design, and has also sped construction in an effort to

cut decades and tens of billions of dollars off the

cost of solidifying the waste, which is left over from

half a century of nuclear weapons production.

 

In a second report, however, the Government

Accountability Office, the Congressional auditing

agency formerly known as the General Accounting

Office, criticized the department earlier this month

for carrying out major construction before the design

is complete, a risky technique called fast-tracking.

The plant " departs from conditions appropriate for

fast-track management, " the G.A.O. said.

 

The Energy Department maintains that it has resolved

the design problems and that it has no alternative to

fast-tracking the project if it is to meet its

promises, issued to the State of Washington and the

Environmental Protection Agency in signed agreements,

to empty the tanks into glass canisters by 2028.

 

Plans are for the factory, which the department hopes

to open in 2011, to use technologies that have never

been demonstrated on so broad a scale. It is to carry

on a process called vitrification, in which the

wastes, some of which will be radioactive for millions

of years, are dissolved in an extra-strong form of

glass and poured into steel canisters, which are then

welded shut.

 

The plan is to bury the canisters eventually at Yucca

Mountain, Nev., in a " glassified " form that is far

more stable than the salts, sludges and liquids in 177

underground tanks now at the Hanford nuclear

reservation. Many of those tanks have leaked, and some

have oozed waste into the Columbia River.

 

But Mr. Alvarez, the former adviser to the Energy

Department, said that the plant would have as much

radioactive material inside as a nuclear reactor and

that " the likelihood of it getting out is much

greater. "

 

Mr. Alvarez is the author of a paper on Hanford that

has been accepted for publication by Science and

Global Security, a peer-reviewed journal at Princeton.

In an interview, he referred to the Hanford cleanup as

" perhaps the most expensive, complex and risky

environmental project in the United States. " He said

he was unable to determine what changes the Energy

Department had made since the regulatory commission's

report that would reduce the risk of a major accident

at Hanford.

 

Roy J. Schepens, manager of the Office of River

Protection, an Energy Department unit in Richland,

Wash., that is in charge of the waste tanks and the

vitrification project, said the commission's

conclusions about the chances of a major accident

concerned previous efforts at the site by a private

company, BNFL, formerly British Nuclear Fuels Limited.

 

When BNFL's price estimate rose to $14 billion from

$3.2 billion, the Energy Department dropped that

company and hired another, Bechtel National, to build

the plant as a government-owned project. The

commission, which generally regulates only private

facilities, then left the site.

 

Responding to the most recent criticism, by the

Government Accountability Office, John Britton, a

spokesman for Bechtel National, acknowledged

construction problems, including improper testing of a

stainless-steel tank that is supposed to hold liquid

used in scrubbing the gas given off by heated waste.

 

" We had some quality-assurance issues with the

vendor, " Mr. Britton said, though adding that

construction was going well.

 

Mr. Schepens, the Energy Department official, pointed

out that a Congressionally created independent body,

the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, monitored

Hanford. He also said there had been many design

improvements since the regulatory commission's audit.

 

Among them are plans for hardware that would limit the

flow of radioactive waste into the glass; water in the

waste can cause steam explosions when hitting molten

glass. Another change is continuous mixing of the

wastes and venting the tanks where it is stored, to

get rid of hydrogen, an explosive gas produced by

radiation in the tanks.

 

Mr. Schepens said the risk of an accident at the plant

would be comparable to that at a civilian reactor,

though Mr. Alvarez pointed out that the department had

a history of melter accidents.

 

The cost of the project undertaken by Bechtel National

has risen to $5.7 billion, a third more than the

estimate. One reason is that the Energy Department

decided to make the plant bigger so it could get the

vitrification done more quickly. Another is that

trying to build the plant while it was still under

design caused costly delays.

 

The accountability office said it feared that the

department might end up with a plant that could not

treat all the waste. In fact, the department built a

vitrification plant in South Carolina in the 1990's to

deal with similar wastes and is still trying to

resolve operating problems there. One of the problems

is hydrogen gas in the system that prepares waste for

the melter.

 

In a letter to Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham,

Senator Maria Cantwell, Democrat of Washington, said

the regulatory commission's estimate of the accident

risk was " quite startling. " The senator said that " it

is not at all clear how and if D.O.E. has responded to

the N.R.C.'s findings regarding safety issues at the

waste treatment plant. "

 

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