ARLINGTON, VA — The head of the Department of Energy’s Hanford Field Office in Richland, Wash., said at a conference here last week it would be feasible to treat 80% of the Hanford Site’s underground tank waste by 2040.
Hanford Field Office Manager Ray Geimer made the remark during a Sept. 15 panel discussion during the National Cleanup Workshop put on by DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and hosted by the Energy Communities Alliance.
Hanford, used for decades to make plutonium for the U.S. defense mission, has roughly 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste in underground tanks.
“The waste has been sitting there in those carbon steel tanks for 75 years,” Geimer said. “We have been working actively on cleanup now for 35 years now, maybe even a little bit more. We are just barely scratching the surface.”
There have been “good gains” at Hanford of late, particularly starting to make glass last October at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). A Hanford spokesperson said earlier this month 200,000 gallons have been turned into glass form so far.
The White House’s fiscal 2027 budget justification for Environmental Management said Hanford might not be fully cleaned up until sometime between 2086 and 2100.
“I believe there is a technical path we can create whereby 80% of the tank waste could be removed, treated and disposed of by 2040, which would be a huge change over what we are currently working towards right now,” Geimer said.
Geimer thinks Hanford’s waste problems are not dramatically more complex than what faces other Cold War and Manhattan Project sites.
“The problem we have is we are working to a needlessly complex plan that’s been created over 35 years ago,” Geimer said. “Technologies have changed, experiences change and there is a different way that things could be done,” Geimer said.
Brian Hartman, Bechtel National’s project director for the WTP, supports DOE’s plan to move on a dual track involving both vitrifying much of the tank waste into glass while also solidifying some of the tank waste into a concrete-like grout to be disposed of in Utah or Texas.