The prime contractor for liquid-waste cleanup at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state is looking for a subcontractor to transport and dispose of non-radioactive waste this fall from test runs of the site’s main treatment plant.
The contract will be worth $900,000 over one year beginning Oct. 1, 2021, Amentum-led Washington River Protection Solutions said in an expression of interest dated Thursday. The test runs are part of the scheduled cold-commissioning of the Waste Treatment Plant’s Low Activity Waste Vitrification Facility, which Bechtel National is building under another contract. The entire plant eventually will turn 54 million gallons of liquid plutonium byproducts in Hanford’s underground tanks into a more stable, glass-like substance.
The transport subcontractor must move up to 700 stainless steel containers and dispose of them after they are filled with non-radioactive, borosilicate glass produced during cold commissioning. The waste will include non-radiological hazardous Resource Conservation and Recovery Act waste and non-regulated waste. This material will be disposed of at an acceptable offsite landfill, the prime said.
Those interested in the transport work should reply to the expression of interest by April 6. Potential subs should email Washington River Protection Solutions procurement specialist Al LeDuc at [email protected].
Bechtel and DOE aim to start low-level radioactive waste operations at the Waste Treatment Plant by December 2023, although the state has agreed to let the work spill into 2024 to compensate for delays attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The plant is legally required to begin processing high-level tank waste by 2036, but DOE appeared uncertain to meet that date even before the COVID-19 pandemic. The agency and Washington state started negotiating potential changes to the startup date for high-level waste in 2019 and were still in negotiations at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor.
At Hanford, DOE stores 54 million gallons of nuclear-weapons waste, created by Manhattan Project and Cold War plutonium production, in 177 underground storage tanks. As the Government Accountability Office noted in a January report, 149 of the tanks are single-shell tanks, almost half of which have leaked contamination into the ground over the years.
