A committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine has scheduled a two-day public meeting in Richland, Wash., starting on Feb. 28 to consider supplemental treatment methods for tank waste at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site.
The Waste Treatment Plant being built at Hanford was not planned to be large enough to treat all 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste left by decades of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Earlier estimates forecast as little as a third of low-activity radioactive waste could be treated at the plant, although DOE has worked to increase the amount of waste that can be loaded in each glass log produced through the vitrification process to allow the plant to treat more waste.
The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 2017 recommended DOE have an analysis done of supplemental waste treatment options at Hanford and a peer review of the analysis conducted by the National Academies. The act said the analysis should assess at a minimum the options of vitrification, grouting and steam reforming, plus further processing to remove long-lived waste constituents such as technetium-99.
The National Academies committee will issue up to four reports after evaluating the technical quality and completeness of the following:
- Methods used to conduct the risk, cost-benefit, schedule, and regulatory compliance assessments and their implementation.
- Waste conditioning and supplemental treatment approaches considered in the assessments, including any approaches not identified by the Department of Energy.
- Other key information and data used in the assessments.
- Results of the assessments.
The meeting will be held 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Feb. 28 at the Red Lion Hotel, 802 George Washington Way in Richland. Presentations will be offered by Hanford DOE and contractor officials and the team doing the analysis for the department. The meeting will continue 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. March 1 with more information from the team doing the analysis in the morning and presentations from stakeholders in the afternoon. Public comment will be heard from 7 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. March 1.
