Should the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state decide to grout much of its supplemental low-activity waste at an existing off-site facility, the process could start as early as 2027, a Savannah River National Laboratory official told a National Academies of Sciences panel Tuesday in Richland, Wash.
Dan McCabe, senior scientist from the national laboratory in South Carolina, made the comment in response to questions raised before an expert panel put together by the National Academies of Sciences’ Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board.
The benefit of immobilizing waste into grout offsite “is speed … and flexibility,” McCabe said. Using an existing vendor to grout supplemental tank waste offsite would eliminate the need to build a grout plant onsite at Hanford, where there is already much construction and commissioning associated with the Waste Treatment Plant, said McCabe and other Savannah River National Laboratory officials.
An updated 2022 federal study by the Savannah River National Laboratory recommends “DOE should expeditiously secure and implement multiple pathways for off-site grout solidification/immobilization and disposal of LAW [low-activity waste] in parallel with direct-feed low-activity waste (DFLAW) vitrification process” at Hanford.
One option under study is having Perma-Fix grout supplemental low-activity waste from Hanford tanks and then ship it out of state for final disposal at either EnergySolutions in Clive, Utah or Waste Control Specialists in Andrews County, Texas, Elena Kalinina, spent nuclear fuel storage transportation and safety specialist, at Sandia National Laboratories, said Tuesday.
The use of Perma-Fix, which has a facility only 11 miles from Hanford, and WCS would bear much resemblance to the test bed initiative model that disposed of three gallons of low-activity waste in this manner. A larger test of up to 2,000 gallons has been proposed.
The Waste Treatment Plant built by Bechtel is scheduled to start vitrifying low-activity tank waste into a glass form by 2023. DOE notionally plans to begin converting high-level waste into glass at the Waste Treatment Plant by 2036.
“To maintain the planned tank waste processing mission schedule,” however, DOE “will require additional LAW [low-activity waste] treatment capacity,” which is dubbed supplemental LAW, according to the Savannah River Lab’s 2022 report, the subject of this week’s information-gathering meetings.
The fiscal 2021 National Defense Authorization Act instructed the board to help analyze findings made by Savannah River National Laboratory.
The lab started with about 23 alternatives for Hanford supplemental waste and winnowed the list down to 15, including onsite, offsite and hybrid options for grout as well as additional vitrification facilities and fluidized bed steam reforming technology akin to the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit at the Idaho National Laboratory.
