The Department of Energy indicated in a draft report issued Tuesday that vitrified low-activity waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state can be disposed of at the facility, rather than requiring transfer to another location.
Conversion of low-activity waste from Hanford’s 177 underground storage tanks into a glass form for disposal is expected to start by the end of 2023 at the Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel.
The draft Waste Incidental to Reprocessing Evaluation concerns roughly 23.5 million gallons of radioactive waste, less than half of the 56 million gallons of the material generated by plutonium production during the Manhattan Project and Cold War. The 23.5 million gallons represents the portion of low-activity tank waste that will be treated using the Direct Feed Low-Activity Waste (DFLAW) approach at the Waste Treatment Plant.
That processed waste would be designated mixed low-level waste, rather than high-level radioactive waste (HLW), and could be disposed of at Hanford’s Integrated Disposal Facility, the draft says.
Provided certain criteria are met the radioactive dose risk from this material taken to IDFwould be no more than from low-level radioactive waste, according to DOE’s calculations.
Before being disposed of on-site, key radionuclides will be removed to the maximum extent practical; certain Nuclear Regulatory Commission and DOE dose standards must be met; and the treated waste will be in a solid form and does not exceed Class C low level radioactive waste radionuclide concentrations, according to a fact sheet.
The Energy Department expects about 13,500 containers of vitrified waste will be produced using the DFLAW approach and subsequently transferred to the on-site disposal facility. The agency said it has long envisioned this sort of on-site disposal at Hanford is something long-envisioned.
Low-activity waste represents 90% of all waste at Hanford, although it represents a small portion of the radionuclides, and the Energy Department has said the Waste Treatment Plant won’t have capacity to handle it all.
Along with pursuing DFLAW, and looking at other alternatives, the Energy Department has also experimented with the Test Bed Initiative. That approach would apply existing technology to draw out low-activity material that would be mixed with grout on-site and shipped for disposal at Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas, the Government Accountability Office said recently.
But after a pilot project involving 3 gallons of waste from underground tanks, DOE suspended the effort in June 2019 and has had nothing new to say about its status since then.
The second phase of the Test Bed Initiative trial would involve treating 2,000 gallons of tank waste. “As far as we know, the TBI program, in some form, will continue to provide an alternative supplemental treatment approach for processing tank waste,” David Waldman, a spokesman for TBI vendor Perma-Fix Environmental Services, said by email Thursday.
Earlier this month, DOE announced award of a new long-term contract, potentially worth $13 billion, for tank waste management to a team led by BWX Technologies. This week that award was protested by two rivals, one a Jacobs-led team that apparently also includes Perma-Fix.
High-level waste will still presumably one day be sent to a national underground repository, such as the stalled Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.
“We are skeptical of DOE models that predict no impact on the environment for radionuclides that have a half-life of 210,000 years,” such as technetium-99 (Tc-99), said Hanford Challenge Executive Director Tom Carpenter.
Hanford Challenge, Columbia Riverkeeper, and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed joint comments in the WIR proceedings in November 2018. In the filing, the advocacy groups suggested DOE would leave far too much toxic waste adjacent to the Columbia River “without any meaningful environmental standards.”
The agency will accept public comment through Sept. 26 on the draft Waste Incidental to Reprocessing Evaluation. The agency said in a Federal Register notice it is also consulting with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission on the proposal.
In addition, DOE’s Office of Environmental Management will hold an online public meeting from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. PT June 10 on the draft document. Details on the online session can be found here.
The public input and consultation with NRC will help the Energy Department write its final WIR evaluation.
Written comments on the draft should be sent to Jennifer Colborn with DOE’s Office of River Protection, 2440 Stevens Drive, Richland, WA 99354. Alternatively, comments can be emailed to: [email protected].
