The Department of Energy Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) at the Hanford Site in Washington state has filled seven canisters with vitrified tank waste as of Friday Oct. 17, according to DOE.
As of Friday morning, Oct. 17 at Hanford “7 containers were full, an 8th was almost complete, and the 9th was in the process of being filled,” a DOE spokesperson said Monday in an email response to Exchange Monitor.
Officials at Hanford and Bechtel National, the construction contractor, announced the startup of the plant, designed to convert liquid radioactive and chemical waste into glass form, last week. The WTP began making glass from some of the less radioactive waste Oct 11, according to the DOE.
The liquid waste, pretreated to remove cesium, is combined with glass-forming ingredients and superheated to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit inside giant melters. Afterward the waste is poured into stainless-steel canisters to cool off and harden into glass form, according to a DOE Hanford website.
The Low-Activity Waste Facility that started up this month at the WTP is 330 feet by 240 feet by 90 feet tall, according to DOE. The stainless steel containers holding the waste-glass are four feet in diameter, seven feet tall, according to a LAW fact sheet.
Hanford has 56 million gallons of radioactive liquid sludge held in underground tanks and some of the tanks have leaked in the past. The waste remains from Hanford’s decades of producing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear weapons program.