Hanford Site tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions has notified the Washington state Department of Ecology that it believes it has finished retrieving waste from double-shell Tank AY-102. That would wrap up the project ahead of the March 4 deadline established in a 2014 settlement agreement with the state.
The agreement required that enough waste be removed from the tank to determine the cause of a leak from its inner shell into the space between the two shells. None of the waste is believed to have breached the outer shell to contaminate the soil beneath the underground waste storage tank. The Department of Ecology said in a statement Tuesday it still is awaiting confirmation from the Department of Energy that it has in fact met the retrieval criteria set out in the agreement.
WRPS, along with the union umbrella group Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council, sent a message to tank farm employees Tuesday afternoon saying that 98 percent of the waste in the tank had been removed. Two technologies were used to retrieve as much waste as possible from the tank, it said. Workers pumped 725,000 gallons of waste into another double-shell tank, leaving 19,000 gallons of sludge in AY-102 when the limits of the technology were reached.
“Now that waste retrieval is complete, a video inspection of the leak site(s) will be conducted as conditions allow,” the message to employees said. “Follow-up activities to further investigate or implement additional retrieval will be planned and executed based on the result of the video inspection and conceptual design evaluation.”
Kevin Smith, manager of the DOE Office of River Protection at Hanford, said in a statement that “WRPS did an exceptional job planning, coordinating, and executing this work. I’m very proud of them for meeting the schedule commitment under challenging conditions, including our unpredictable winter weather.”
