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News :: Environment : Government Secrecy : Nukes |
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High Accident Risk Is Seen in Atomic Waste Project |
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by Matthew L. Wald
(No verified email address) |
27 Jul 2004
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The legacy of Cold War insanity continues to plague the public and the environment -- a radioactive release from Hanford would be upwind from the majority of the population in the country, potentially exposing millions to an isotopic witch's brew of radiation
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....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." |
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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