Workers at the Hanford Site in Washington state last week practiced three early steps of solidifying liquid radioactive waste inside glass, a site contractor said Tuesday in a press release.
Personnel poured glass beads called frit into a heated melter at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, liquifying the glass in a first-ever trial run of the process that the Department of Energy and plant prime Bechtel National hope will lead to the solidification of millions of gallons of liquid waste left over from the Cold War nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union.
The process, known as vitrification, involves mixing waste from underground tanks with the molten glass to produce stable, solid cylinders that can be stored indefinitely. Under federal law, the cylinders will be high-level waste that must be disposed of in a deep underground repository such as the proposed Yucca Mountain site in Nye County, Nev., that the U.S. has effectively abandoned.
DOE uses vitrification daily at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, which like Hanford produced plutonium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. However, Hanford’s waste is more challenging to treat and, initially, the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant will treat only Hanford’s less radioactive waste, known as low-activity waste.
The start of this Direct Feed Low Activity Waste program has been delayed multiple times and is now on the slate for 2025, DOE has said.
Last week, toward the end of a roughly hour-long conference call with investors, the CEO of Perma-Fix Environmental Solutions said Direct Feed Low Activity Waste treatment might begin in August of 2025.
Bechtel’s contract to build the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant started in December 2000, runs through December 2022 and is valued at $14.7 billion, according to a DOE website. The company published its press release about melting glass at the plant on its website.
In 2016, DOE estimated it could cost close to $20 million, in 2022 dollars, to build the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, the Government Accountability Office reported.
