5
Conclusion
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) faces many difficult choices in the management of the tank waste at Hanford, one essential part of which is the management of the supplemental low-activity waste (SLAW). While SLAW represents a significant fraction (at least one-third) of the waste volume and a small fraction (less than 10 percent) of the overall radioactivity, the costs and consequences of its treatment are by any standard extremely significant. The congressionally mandated report of the Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) team advances the understanding of the options available to DOE, in part by limiting the universe of possibilities to a suite that can likely meet regulatory standards and can be directly compared on other grounds, and in part by expanding the realistic disposal options beyond a controversial on-site facility. While the committee offers numerous comments and cautions regarding the final FFRDC report, it is clear that the FFRDC took on a very difficult task and were responsive to both the congressional mandate and to the committee’s iterative peer reviews.
Moreover, the FFRDC report shines a light on several fundamental issues that are beyond the scope of the congressional mandate but that will have to be part of the ultimate decision-making process for SLAW and other key clean-up decisions at Hanford. For instance, the report reveals a fundamental disconnect between the current clean-up baseline and long-term funding streams. Unless this is explicitly resolved in decision-making about SLAW and other decision-making at the Hanford site, there are risks of slippage in time to completion, increase in cost, and increased risk of failure of the current waste configuration. Likewise, the report’s appropriate focus on iodine-129 and technetium-99, which may be disposed in LAW and SLAW, highlights potential inconsistencies in the treatment of long-lived radionuclides, which DOE will have to resolve. Finally, the report also suggests the potential value of a mixed or hybrid approach that gains resilience with parallelism and is capable of adapting to new and improved technologies that are virtually certain to appear over the coming decades.
The committee has observed in previous review reports (see, in particular, Review #3) through the course of this study that the most effective opportunities for making meaningful improvements in Hanford’s overall environmental outcomes would require consideration of a broader scope of issues than that defined by Sec. 3134 and the Statement of Task. The treatment and disposal of SLAW will be in many ways the literal end of a long chain of decisions and actions that will not only constrain the options for SLAW, but will also sharply limit the degree to which any SLAW decision—however carefully considered in and of itself—can affect the overall environmental outcomes or costs of the Hanford clean-up. In addition to constraining technical options to be compared, it has become apparent that costs for the Hanford site will be far above $2 billion per year (a level that is much higher than what DOE’s Office of River Protection has received in preceding years). And the overall consequence of insufficient funding is like an indefinite extension of the project length—which, as the committee has previously observed in Review #3, puts the Hanford site environment at increased risk. This is because the projected costs of upgrading the tanks, conducting tank operations, and constructing the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant exceed that level (see Figure 2-1 in Appendix A). Thus, the comparisons and trade-offs among SLAW options, while important in themselves, tend to mask the fundamental problem that even the least costly SLAW alternative is likely beyond the available funding.
In his oral comments during the October 31, 2019, public meeting, Chief Rex Buck, Jr., of the Wanapum tribe expressed his view that the FFRDC and committee, while so intensely focused on cost and benefit
computations, had lost sight of the true problem, which is to clean up the land called Hanford, and that there is a “responsibility to take care of the land” so that it can be passed down to future generations for their use.1 The committee will not pretend that it can fairly represent all that he wished to convey, but his statement did strike a vein of truth for the committee about the dilemma posed by this project’s scope. Cost-benefit analysis (which is one objective of Sec. 3134’s SLAW comparison) can be incomplete in identifying meaningful system-wide improvements when the options it will evaluate are defined too narrowly, such as by excluding significant interdependencies with other decisions affecting the system of which they are inextricably a part. Such is the case for the present analysis scope.
The combination of these two factors—large funding increases that appear to be needed into the future for Hanford clean-up and the technical dependency of the definable SLAW options on a set of fixed upstream decisions and actions—has created a situation in which analysis of one component is incomplete and outcomes cannot truly be optimized independently. This realization does not render the work of the FFRDC unimportant or inconsequential; however, it has promoted a clearer recognition—one that the committee wishes to highlight—that the challenge facing Hanford cannot be solved by incremental improvements in the SLAW portion of the clean-up alone.
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