The Department of Energy is more than halfway toward its goal of removing cesium from a million gallons of liquid radioactive waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state, a prerequisite for solidifying the waste in the coming years, a DOE manager told the Hanford Advisory Board Aug. 23
Cesium removal should resume in September outside of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, where crews have already processed three batches of liquid waste, or about 541,000 gallons worth, using the Tank Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) system, Delmar Noyes, Office of River Protection assistant manager for tank farms, told the Hanford Advisory Board.
The DOE plans to run about one million gallons through TSCR before starting up the Direct-Feed-Low-Activity-Waste Facilities at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, which is being commissioned by Bechtel.
DOE currently plans to start converting the pretreated waste into glass in 2025 and it should take two more batches, in addition to the three already completed, to reach one million gallons in this initial “campaign,” Noyes said.
TSCR is a pilot project operated by contractor Washington River Protection Solutions and it ended its third batch run July 1 when it started a maintenance run early. As a pilot, it will subsequently be replaced around 2025 by a larger-volume facility to serve the vitrification plant, Noyes said.
The Hanford Site, which until the 1980s made plutonium for military purposes, has about 56 million gallons of leftover radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks. DOE expects the vitrification plant to solidify all of the high-level waste but no more than 60% of the less radioactive waste, which accounts for most of the volume.
Given this, DOE is laying groundwork for a demonstration project to solidify 2,000 gallons of low-level radioactive waste into a concrete-like grout prior to final disposal, Noyes said. Half of the waste in the demonstration would go to the Waste Control Specialists disposal site in West Texas and half to EnergySolutions in Clive, Utah.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management filed a research, development, and demonstration permit application in June for the grout project, formally known as the test-bed initiative.
The state’s public comment period on the demonstration project is currently scheduled between Oct. 16 and Dec. 2, although that could slip as the state seeks some additional information from DOE, said Stephanie Schleif, deputy nuclear waste program manager for the Washington Department of Ecology.
