Nuclear Health and Safety

Further Improvement Needed in the Hanford Tank Farm Maintenance Program Gao ID: RCED-95-29 November 8, 1994

At the Energy Department's (DOE) Hanford facility in Washington state, a backlog in routine maintenance increases the risk of a significant leak or accident involving underground storage tanks that hold 61 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste. Some progress has been made in strengthening the tank farm maintenance program. Westinghouse, a contractor at Hanford, believes that a new maintenance approach has helped to reduce the number of uncompleted maintenance projects from 1,969 to 1,517. However, the remaining backlog of projects is still too great to guarantee that needed maintenance will be done in a timely manner. Tank farm maintenance personnel estimate that to respond promptly to maintenance needs, the number of projects awaiting completion should not exceed three months' work--about 300 projects, or less than one-fifth of the current backlog. Westinghouse can further improve its maintenance program by reducing the time spent preparing and closing out maintenance projects. Westinghouse has started to experiment with procedures that other DOE sites use to reduce delays, and these experiments show promise. Westinghouse can also improve its program by gathering and analyzing more information about how it processes maintenance projects.

GAO found that: (1) the Hanford management and operations contractor has implemented a new approach for coordinating maintenance work on the tank farms; (2) although the contractor has reduced the number of uncompleted maintenance projects by about 20 percent, the remaining large backlog of uncompleted projects endangers its ability to complete needed maintenance in a timely manner; (3) radioactive wastes at the tank farms make timely maintenance critical; and (4) the contractor could improve its tank farm maintenance program by reducing the time spent in preparing and closing out maintenance projects, developing benchmarks for measuring performance, and gathering and analyzing more information on how maintenance projects are carried out.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

Director: Team: Phone:


The Justia Government Accountability Office site republishes public reports retrieved from the U.S. GAO These reports should not be considered official, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Justia.