Waste appears to have been emptied to regulatory standards at the first Hanford tank farm, should tests show work has been adequate.
Washington River Protection Solutions has used three technologies to their limit, to empty the 16th and final tank in the C Tank Farm. Regulatory requirements require that either three technologies be used to their capacity or all but about 2,700 gallons of waste be removed from the 530,000 gallon capacity tank. That would leave about one inch of waste if it were spread evenly over the bottom of the tank.
DOE estimates that about 4,500 gallons of waste remain in Tank C-105 after using three technologies to empty waste from the tank. Video inspections of the interior of the tank are planned to verify the amount of waste remaining. In addition, the waste will be sampled to provide information to the Washington State Department of Ecology, the regulator for the Hanford tank farms, about the amount of technetium 99 in contains.
“It’s taken longer than we had hoped, but still we’re very happy to see retrievals completed at the first Hanford tank farm,” said Alex Smith, manager of the Washington State Department of Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Program. The first C Farm tank was declared empty at the start of 2004.
“While this marks a major milestone in the Hanford cleanup, it also highlights the huge amount of work still to do,” Smith said. “Yet, we know Energy has been learning lessons as it progressed through C-Farm retrievals. We’ll work to ensure that those lessons are applied moving forward, so retrievals proceed at a much faster pace.”
Retrieval of waste at the C Tank Farm was considered a demonstration project, with multiple waste retrieval technologies tried there. DOE plans to next empty tanks in the AX and A Tank Farms.
