The new Bechtel-Washington glassification project team expects to take four months to crank up to full steam at Hanford.

By April, Bechtel-Washington is scheduled to employ about 700 people, fully control the design work and hire a subcontractor to handle operations matters. Also, Bechtel-Washington is supposed to have a master design-and-construction plan plus cost figures mapped out by April.

Today, this joint venture of Bechtel National Inc. and Washington Group International has a dozen people in a north Richland office tackling the third day of a $4 billion effort to design, build and test plants in central Hanford to convert radioactive wastes into glass by 2011. Then, a long-term operating company is supposed to take over.

"We're starting to mobilize our team," said Ron Naventi, Bechtel-Washington's project manager. Naventi, 56, has been a senior vice president and manager of operations for Bechtel National and has 21 years with the multinational engineering giant.

Todd Martin, chairman-elect of the Hanford Advisory Board, said: "My concern is that getting a contractor on board is only one small step in this project."

The plants still have to be built, and Congress still has to appropriate the needed $4 billion over the next 10 years, he noted.

Hanford has 53 million gallons of radioactive wastes in 177 underground tanks the Department of Energy wants to convert into glass - the most radioactive 10 percent by 2018 and the rest by 2028.

Bechtel-Washington replaces a former team led by BNFL Inc. and Bechtel that spent two years designing those plants with the intention of building and operating them.

But DOE fired BNFL, the lead contractor, last May when the project's overall cost estimate zoomed from $6.9 billion to $15.2 billion. Much of that skyrocketing price came from DOE's and BNFL's plans for private investors to sink billions of dollars up front while waiting several years for DOE to pay them back. That resulted in extraordinarily high financing costs.

Then, DOE removed Bechtel from the project to avoid a conflict of interest when the federal agency sought new bidders for the project. CH2M Hill Hanford group became the interim caretaker - absorbing 189 Bechtel and BNFL employees and 278 of that team's subcontractors' workers.

Two teams submitted bids. Bechtel led a team of itself and Northwest construction behemoth Washington Group. Fluor Corp. led a team of itself, Cogema Inc. and Foster Wheeler Corp. DOE selected Bechtel-Washington on Monday with many Hanford observers, including Martin and Gov. Gary Locke, praising it for quickly picking a replacement.

DOE officials said measures were taken to ensure Bechtel did not have an unfair advantage because of its previous experience in the project. Martin said DOE tried to level the playing field, but Bechtel's history with this project gave it "a home court advantage" on winning the contract.

Naventi said Bechtel-Washington plans to issue a request for proposals from potential operations companies around Feb. 1. BNFL and Cogema are interested in that contract.

Then, Bechtel-Washington expects to sift through and hire most of the original glassification team's workers from CH2M Hill by April. Then, it hopes to start hiring construction trades workers and begin some limited construction by November 2001. The construction work force should peak at 2,000 to 2,500 people a couple of years later.

Meanwhile, the contract says 60 percent of the work's dollar value is supposed to be subcontracted beyond the core team. A few small contracts should go out for bids soon, with several major ones materializing in the latter half of 2001, Naventi said. Two area radioactive waste processing companies, GTS Duratek and Allied Technology Group, have already voiced interest in some of that work.

Bechtel-Washington is required to convert the first wastes into glass by 2007, having until 2011 to get fully operational.

Meanwhile, DOE has hired Bechtel-Washington under an incentive-oriented contract, which is drastically different from what was proposed for BNFL-Bechtel.

DOE will reimburse Bechtel-Washington frequently for the project's costs. But Bechtel-Washington's fees - meaning profits - will be tied to whether the team can trim costs and move ahead of schedule.

If the project is completed on time for $4 billion, Bechtel-Washington would earn $275 million in profits through 2011. That would go up to $475 million if the project's costs end up at $3 billion. The team could earn a top amount of $600 million if the project costs $3 billion, finishes more than a year early and significantly improves the original designs.

However, if the price tag zooms up to $5 billion, Bechtel-Washington would earn only $75 million in profits by 2011. Also, DOE can fire Bechtel-Washington if costs skyrocket beyond what the agency can accept.