Twenty-five years after the Department of Energy contracted Bechtel National to build a plant to vitrify radioactive sludge into a glass form, the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) began operation this week at the Hanford Site at Richland, Wash.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management said Wednesday Hanford’s Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste Facility (DFLAW) at WTP has made glass for the first time, meeting an Oct. 15 deadline set under a consent decree with Washington state.
“I appreciate the hard work and determination of the entire Hanford team to deliver on this legal commitment,” Hanford Site Manager Ray Geimer said in a DOE press release. “This achievement enables us to shift focus to safely operating the plant and to progressing solutions for the Hanford tank waste mission in its entirety.”
“It’s about time,” Gerry Pollet (D), a member of the Washington state House who also helps run a Hanford watchdog group, said last week via email about the planned startup.
Continued operation could be complicated by the government shutdown that started Oct. 1.
The Hanford Site has roughly 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste held in 177 underground tanks, many of them leak-prone single-shell tanks. The waste remains from Hanford’s work from the 1940s through the 1970s producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
Most of the 56 million gallons is low-level radioactive waste. The waste will be mixed with glass-forming chemicals and heated to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit inside large melters. The treated waste will be poured into stainless steel containers to harden into a glass form as the mixture cools down, according to DOE. Once in glass form, the waste “will be stable and impervious to the environment, and its radioactivity will safely dissipate over hundreds to thousands of years,” according to a DOE Hanford website.
The feds had originally hoped the Waste Treatment Plant would open in 2009. DOE announced last week that it had transferred the first liquid waste into the DFLAW at the WTP. Startup of the low-level radioactive waste work has been delayed many times due to technology problems, redesigns and other factors, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Together with its government and labor partners “we’ve turned vitrification into a reality at Hanford. It’s an important step forward in protecting the Columbia River, surrounding communities, and future generations,” said Dena Volovar, President of Bechtel’s Nuclear, Security & Environmental business.
Bechtel has a construction contract, valued at $16-billion, which started in late 2000. After a period determined by DOE, Bechtel will hand over operation of DFLAW to BWXT-led Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure (H2C).
Hanford is not expected to start treating high-level radioactive waste at WTP until the 2030s. DOE is also embracing a secondary strategy where some of the lower-level radioactive waste will be solidified into a concrete-like grout and taken to licensed disposal sites in Utah and Texas.