Hanford Challenge has called for a halt to work at the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant after the Department of Energy proposed a new milestone for simultaneous operation of all parts of the plant in 2039, a 17-year extension from the current milestone. An independent entity should be created to design a new path forward for treating the 56 million gallons of waste held in underground tanks and to determine if the vitrification plant can be salvaged, Hanford Challenge said. “Hanford Challenge wants Hanford’s highly radioactive tank waste immobilized in glass, but this path is not going to get us there. We need a plan B,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge, in a statement. He wants DOE to be required to immediately begin building 12 new waste storage tanks to supplement the 27 usable double-shell tanks at Hanford. The double shell tanks are used to store waste from leak-prone single shell tanks until the waste can be vitrified for permanent disposal. The number of single shell tanks that can be emptied will be limited if some of the waste in the double shell tanks is not treated to free up space.
DOE has been reluctant to build more tanks, saying 1-million-gallon storage tanks would cost $85 million to $125 million each. The money could better be spent on emptying tanks and working toward getting the waste treated, it has said. “DOE remains committed to the successful completion and operation of the WTP as a method for processing tank waste stored in underground tanks at Hanford, thereby reducing risks to the environment,” DOE said in a statement. It continues to believe a sequenced approach to completing and commissioning the vitrification plant is the “appropriate, practical and safest solution,” it said. It has committed significant resources, it said, to a plan that also is favored by the state of Washington to start treating some low activity radioactive waste as soon as 2022 while technical issues involving high level radioactive waste are resolved. The approach is intended to allow some waste to be treated for disposal long before the full plant is operating, freeing up some space in double shell tanks.
The vitrification plant has been plagued by “delay after delay,” Hanford Challenge said. It questioned whether by 2039 much of the plant’s equipment would be obsolete, corroded or unreliable. The Seattle-based group criticized DOE for spending $19 billion since 1989 in attempts to start treating Hanford tank waste. There have been seven previous plans or attempts to build a plant, including one projected to cost $4.6 billion for a pilot-scale plant scheduled to start vitrifying waste in 2008.
