The highly-contaminated Hanford Site in Washington state accounted for over half the environmental liability for the entire Department of Energy, but opportunities exist for curbing increasing costs at the property, according to a congressional watchdog.
In a new report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said DOE could save “tens of billions of dollars” by abandoning plans to complete a stalled pretreatment system for radioactive tank sludge before it is fed into the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) being built by Bechtel. DOE should also “opt for grout” in treating the final 40% of low-level radioactive waste.
The pretreatment facility was originally intended to minimize the fraction of tank waste that would be high-level waste, said GAO’s director for natural resources and environment, Nathan Anderson, in an email response to Weapons Complex Monitor. There are new ways to reduce the fraction now, including Tank-Side Cesium Removal, he added.
In past WTP material, DOE has said the pretreatment facility, which would be as large as about four football fields, would filter out solids and highly-radioactive isotopes before separating the high-level waste from the low-level waste and sending each to respective vitrification facilities.
Hanford’s $265 billion environmental liability was over 65% of the $407-billion total for DOE’s Office of Environmental Management during fiscal 2021, and more than half of the $516-billion environmental liability for the entire department, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) said Friday.
DOE plans to start turning Hanford’s less radioactive tank waste into glass at WTP by the end of next year using the direct-feed low-activity waste method. However, the facility can only handle 60% of the 49 million gallons low-level waste in the underground tank farms. Then there is another five million gallons of far more radioactive high-level waste that DOE plans to start immobilizing in glass starting in 2033.
Currently, DOE plans to complete the pretreatment facility, suspended since 2012, and build a second facility to vitrify remaining supplemental low-activity waste, would likely require $28 billion in funding from fiscal 2023 through fiscal 2033.
But killing the pretreatment system and also grouting the supplemental low-activity waste, the excess waste that the current facility cannot handle, could conceivably drop this expense to $12 billion over the same period, GAO said.
In the absence of the pretreatment facility, DOE is demonstrating tank-side cesium removal on low-level waste at Hanford. Tank-side cesium removal is designed to prepare about one million gallons of the less radioactive waste for vitrification. The agency also is looking at such technologies as an option for the high-level waste, GAO said.
“DOE agrees that opportunities exist that could enable Hanford to tackle the entire tank waste mission in a more timely and cost-effective manner,” a spokesperson for the agency said in a Wednesday email. “The Department continues working in a collaborative manner with the State of Washington and the EPA on the path forward for high-level tank waste treatment and leveraging the expertise of the National Academies of Sciences and others as supplemental low-activity waste options are analyzed.”
The agency finished the first phase of the Test Bed Initiative in 2017 to show the feasibility of grouting low-level waste for off-site disposal. Congress appropriated $7 million in the fiscal 2022 budget for this effort, now rebranded as the Low-Level Waste Offsite Disposal Project.
The price tag of the entire WTP, with its many many technical problems and setbacks, is a moving target. When construction started in 2000, WTP was expected to cost about $4.3 billion, GAO said.
But as of June 2022, DOE had spent $13 billion and the agency still lacks a firm cost estimate given that both the pretreatment facility and the high-level waste treatment facility have been on hold. In 2018, the Army Corps of Engineers estimated the total cost could fall between $33 billion and $42 billion.
Tank waste is subject to wide-ranging “holistic” talks occurring behind closed doors between the feds and the Washington Department of Ecology. Those talks are still ongoing, a state spokesperson said Thursday.
