The Department of Energy said Tuesday workers have installed startup heaters to warm up the second 300-ton melter for the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
The 18 temporary startup heaters are meant to raise the operating temperature of the second melter to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit, DOE said in a press release. The melters at the Bechtel-built plant are designed to superheat low-level radioactive tank waste together with glass-forming materials to create a mixture of molten glass and waste.
Eventually, once the melter is hot enough for molten glass operations, the startup heaters will be replaced with bubblers that inject air into the melted glass pool, DOE said in the release.
DOE’s Hanford Site manager Brian Vance said recently crews could start warming up the second melter this month, saying progress was slowed by some problems, now fixed, with the first melter at the plant’s Direct-Feed-Low-Activity Waste Facilities. DOE had hoped to start testing the second melter in December.
The agency’s current schedule calls for the Waste Treatment Plant to start converting some low-level tank waste into glass during the first half of 2025. There are roughly 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste, left over from decades of plutonium production, in Hanford’s underground tanks.
