The Energy Department and a contractor building a waste treatment plant at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site procured and installed tanks that did not always meet requirements of a quality assurance program or the contract, a federal audit concluded Monday.
The audit also found that the agency had paid the contractor a $15 million incentive fee for production of a tank that was later determined to be defective and, while it demanded the fee be returned, never followed up to ensure that it was.
In recent months, the $12.3 billion plant under construction at south-central Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation has been the subject of whistleblower complaints about its design and safety. The plant is being built to convert highly radioactive glass into a stable glass form for permanent disposal underground.
The tanks' design is significant because they will be located in so-called "black cells," which are areas of the plant that will be too radioactively hot for workers to enter once the plant is operating.
TVNL Comment: There is no room for nuclear power plants on this planet. We can not tolerate or survive the "problems" associated with them. There is no such thing as "risk". Risk + time = eventuality. Nuclear disasters will happen. That is simply realty. And we can not survive nuclear disasters.