A Department of Energy contractor at the Hanford Site in Washington state will commence retrieving radioactive waste from a single-shell tank next month, a federal safety board said recently.
Amentum-led contractor Washington River Protection Solutions plans to begin retrieval of tank AX-101’s waste in mid-November, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) said in a staff report dated Sept. 23 and recently posted on its website.
A slurry pump has been connected to AX-101, which holds about 375,000 gallons of waste, primarily sludge-like saltcake, according to the DNFSB. The board report goes on to say AX-101 is the last remaining unit at the AX Tank Farm with a large amount of waste.
Pumping the waste out of AX-101 is expected to take between one and two years, the DOE Office of Environmental Management said in August.
The AX farm has four 1-million-gallon single-shell tanks built in the 1960s, according to DOE. There is an estimated 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste held in 177 underground tanks at Hanford, holding the residue of decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons. Of the 177 tanks, 149 are single-shell tanks built between the 1940s and the 1960s and often prone to leaks. The DOE and the Washington Department of Ecology recently announced a joint agreement on how to handle tank leaks such as the one at B-109, leaking since at least April 2021.
The DOE has been transferring waste from single-shell to the double-shell tanks as an interim measure until the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant can start solidifying tank waste into a glass form.
