The tank waste pretreatment system at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state set a record in September by removing cesium from 222,000 gallons of low-level liquid radioactive waste, DOE announced Tuesday..
The Tank-Side Cesium-Removal (TSCR) system started operation in 2022. TSCR is set up to filter out cesium and undissolved solids from the tank waste before it is eventually fed into the Direct-Feed-Low-Activity Waste (DFLAW) Facility at Hanford’s multi-billion Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP).
The cesium and solids together account for more than 99% of the radioactivity in the liquid waste before it is vitrified into a solid glass form at WTP, which started making glass in October 2025.
TSCR was offline for about six months this year. Waste pretreated through TSCR is stored in Tank AP-106 before heading to the plant for solidification, according to DOE. The limited capacity of AP-106 has often proven to be a bottleneck, DOE has said.
“This was a demanding run, but our operations, maintenance and engineering teams kept working through the issues and safely delivered the largest amount of pretreated waste TSCR has processed in one batch so far,” said Ken Langdon, president of BWXT-led contractor Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure (H2C). DOE announced the September result in a news release emailed to Exchange Monitor.
