In another pratfall for the 80-year tragicomedy of nuclear waste cleanup at the Department of Energy’s closed Hanford, Wash., nuclear weapons site on the Columbia River, a federal judge has tossed out a $45 billion, 10-15-year cleanup contract during a dispute over the award. The Tri-City Herald reported Tuesday (June 13) that Judge Marian Blank Horn of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, D.C., ruled the contract invalid and no work can go forward on the cleanup. Her order was sealed.
On June 8, the U.S. Justice Department told Horn’s court that it did not appear that either bidder for the giant contract was properly registered to bid. Justice asked Horn to return the contract to DOE to determine that issue, and others, including a claim by the losing bidder that the winner’s safety record at Hanford should disqualify it. The Richland, Wash., newspaper wrote, “Both bidders accused the other of not being properly registered as required in a federal database, the System for Award Management, to file a bid on the Hanford work.”
In April, DOE awarded the contract to Hanford Tank Waste Operations and Closure, known as H2C, a joint venture led by BWXT, a spinoff of long-time nuclear developer Babcock & Wilcox. BWXT’s partners on the Hanford project include Amentum Environment & Energy, and Fluor Federal Service. The losing bidder, the Hanford Tank Disposition Alliance, is a joint venture of Atkins Nuclear Secured, Jacobs Technology, and Westinghouse Government Services.
Starting in 2009, Washington River Protection Solutions, a private company owned by Amentum and Atkins, with Orano as a subcontractor, ran the cleanup of the Hanford waste tanks, containing some 56 million gallons of liquid radioactive and chemical wastes and posing a serious threat to the river. The wastes were originally stored in single-walled tanks, but most eventually were replaced with double-walled tanks. The main project to permanently deal with some of the least radioactive liquids has been to vitrify them, isolating them into glass and eventually move the solid wastes to final underground storage. Neither has occurred.
The cessation of work on the cleanup will halt further work on the vitrification project, which has been under construction for 21 years and has yet to start up. The plans for underground storage ground to a halt when the Yucca Mountain project finally collapsed in the early days of the Obama administration.
DOE decided in April 2021 to seek a new cleanup contractor and issued a request for bids for the $45 billion contract in October 2021, including $17 billion for the vitrification plant. It would have been the first specific contract for the glassification effort.
The Hanford site, chosen by the Manhattan Project in 1943 to make plutonium for the nation’s nascent nuclear arsenal, taking advantage of the copious Columbia cooling water. Production under the Atomic Energy Commission and its successors, including DOE, continued until 1987. For most of its production period, wastes piled up with little attempt to do more than isolate them in giant tanks. Denial, not disposal, was the defining response to the wastes.
When those tanks began to leak, threatening the river, attempts to deal with the noxious legacy began. In 1989, DOE, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Washington State Department of Ecology signed a cleanup agreement, known as the “Tri-Party Agreement” to clean up the site under EPA’s Superfund authority.
Cleanup has proceeded in fits and starts since, and the scale of the problem grew greater as time passed. At a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing last month, according to the Tri-City Herald, DOE estimated that “$300 billion to $640 billion will be needed to complete the remainder of Hanford environmental cleanup by 2078.”
What happens now that the federal court has voided the contract and essentially punted the issue back to DOE is unclear. It took DOE two years to award the now invalid contract. Further court action is possible, maybe even likely.
–Kennedy Maize
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