Six national laboratories will split $27.3 million from the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management to help hasten cleanup of underground radioactive waste at the DOE’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
In a separate but related development, Congress, in a report appended to a full-year appropriations bill signed Saturday, called for briefings to lawmakers within 30 days on an analysis about using alternate means such as concrete-like grout to solidify portions of Hanford’s liquid waste that cannot be accommodated at the site’s vitrification plant.
The plant is to open in 2025 and turn a portion of Hanford’s less-radioactive liquid tank waste into glass-like logs.
The laboratory funding, announced Friday in a press release, goes toward projects at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois, Idaho National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state, Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, the agency said.
The half-dozen labs will carry out 13 research and development about Hanford’s underground tank waste, according to the press release.
The laboratory projects were sparked by Hanford’s 2022 R&D Roadmap, developed by DOE. To speed cleanup of about 56 million gallons of liquid waste generated from decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons. Hanford solicited proposals from the labs in June.
Most of Hanford’s radioactive tank waste is low-level and while the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant will eventually convert all of the site’s high-level waste into a glass-like form, the plant only has capacity for 40% of the low-level waste, DOE has said.
Analysis into what is referred to as the supplemental waste at Hanford was previously authorized by Congress and has been carried out by a research team run through Savannah River National Laboratory in coordination with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. This has increased interest in grout as an alternative.
