Something akin to the canceled Yucca Mountain high-level radioactive waste repository in Nevada is still central to disposal of thousands of canisters from the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, according to the lifecycle cost report published last week.
The Bechtel-built Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford, expected to run for 40 years or more, is supposed to start converting low-activity radioactive tank waste into a glass form by the end of 2023 and commence high-level waste conversion in the 2030s, according to the report.
As a result, thousands of glass canisters of vitrified waste will initially be stored at Hanford before eventually going to an underground geologic repository, according to the report.
The former plutonium production complex near the Columbia River will “provide interim storage for a minimum of 4,000 IHLW [immobilized high-level waste] canisters and will be expandable in increments of 2,000 canisters up to a maximum of 16,000 canisters, if needed, to mitigate the risk associated with the availability of offsite geologic repository,” according to the 240-page report.
Eventually, Hanford’s high-level waste (HLW) glass canisters will go to “an unidentified offsite national repository,” which DOE assumes will have “the same waste acceptance criteria as the Yucca Mountain national repository.”
After the Barack Obama administration effectively blocked development of the Yucca Mountain repository, the president’s Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future in 2012 endorsed a new consent based approach for management and disposal of HLW and spent nuclear fuel, the Hanford report notes.
There was talk during the Obama administration of building a separate Defense Waste Repository, which then-Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz said could be constructed faster and at less expense than Yucca, but the idea lost momentum during the Donald Trump administration, which tried but failed to revive Yucca.
While vitrification of HLW is still technically supposed to begin in 2033, it is one of the “milestones at risk,” at Hanford, according to the cost report, which is published every three years. The document estimates ultimate Hanford cleanup could run from as low as $300 billion to as much as $641 billion.
