Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
4/25/2014
Procurement of equipment to remove contaminated sludge from at Hanford’s K-Basin near the Columbia River begins later this year in a major project that received $31.6 million in the Department of Energy’s Fiscal Year 2015 budget request. Extensive preparations are now underway for the actual transfer of the material, including testing at a full-scale mockup of the basin with a sludge simulant, as well as consideration of ergonomic design with the workers for the equipment. “You’ve got one chance to get it right. Once you operate the system and you have it contaminated, it’s very difficult to correct a design problem,” DOE Richland Manager Matt McCormick told WC Monitor this week. “We don’t want to go down that road. That’s why we are taking a long time on the front end to confirm the design and test it out so that we have a predictable process on the back end.”
The heavy sludge is a mixture of concrete, sediment and debris from spent fuel rods produced by the site’s N Reactor decades ago, which were stored in two water-filled basins—K-West and K-East. The fuel rods were removed and the sludge was vacuumed out of the east basin in the 2000s and stored in stainless steel boxes, which were moved for storage underwater in the west side while decommissioning and demolition was completed at the east basin. The goal now is to demolish the west basin, reducing risk of contamination entering the river. To do that, the sludge must be transferred out of those stainless steel boxes into transportation and storage containers that will be sent to T Plant on the central plateau for storage, and will eventually be treated with the bulk of it ultimately disposed of at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
Project Won’t Meet Tri-Party Agreement Milestone
The schedule for when the transfers begin remains uncertain, but will be more clear once procurement begins, McCormick said. However, transfers will not begin by the September 2014 milestone in the Tri-Party Agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency and the state of Washington. “We’ve informed the regulators in terms of the impacts. That was due to the budget control act that happened a year ago,” McCormick said. “Sequestration put this milestone at risk. We’ll work with the regulators per the Tri-Party Agreement for adjustment of that milestone as we better understand when we are going to start.” The FY’15 budget request calls for a total project cost of $308 million with an estimated completion date in Fiscal Year 2018.
Testing, Annex Construction Underway
Right now DOE and contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company are testing the system, and building an annex to house the dozen or so storage containers before they are sent to the plateau. “We will actually mobilize the sludge that is stored in the containers and transfer it through a hose system underwater and then out of the basin and into this annex that we’re building. It’s a temporary structure that will house the shipping/storage containers, it will provide containment protection,” McCormick said. He added, “We are at the point where we will be ready to start the procurement of the equipment this fall in order to get the sludge into this transportation/storage containers.
