A month after starting up the long-awaited plant to turn liquid waste into glass form, crews at the Hanford Site in Richland, Wash., took another key step on an environmental project to protect the Columbia River.
“Over the weekend, crews removed the first cesium capsules from the underground pool at the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility (WESF) as they prepare to transfer them to dry storage,” the president of Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup, Bob Wilkinson, said in a Nov. 12 memo to employees.
The memo was viewed by Exchange Monitor.
“This project is critical to the overall Hanford cleanup mission, as WESF contains a substantial portion of the site’s long-lived radioactive materials,” Wilkinson went on to say. “By transferring the capsules to protective casks and moving them to the nearby Capsule Storage Area, we ensure safe and compliant storage of the capsules and reduce extensive monitoring and maintenance costs.”
The effort to move 1,936 capsules from wet-to-dry storage has been in the works for years. In the 1970s, cesium and strontium were removed from underground waste-storage tanks at Hanford to lower the temperature of the waste inside, according to a DOE Hanford website.
“While the capsules are currently in a safe configuration, the WESF is an aging facility,” DOE says on its WESF information website. “Dry storage would eliminate the possibility of a release of radioactive material in the unlikely event of a loss of storage-pool water, and subsequent overheating and breach of the capsules.”
The transfer of the radioactive capsules to the large concrete casks is overseen by the Washington state Department of Ecology, said Ryan Miller, a spokesperson for that department.
The start of the capsule relocation comes a month after more than 10,000 gallons of tank waste was vitrified into a glass form at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), DOE’s manager of the Hanford Site said Nov. 13. The waste from tank A-101 was solidified into glass Oct. 11, DOE’s Hanford Field Office Manager Ray Geimer said in a presentation to the Oregon Hanford Cleanup Board.
Some of the less-radioactive sludge is now being vitrified at the Direct-Feed-Low-Activity-Waste (DFLAW) Facility at WTP, Geimer said.
“The most recent info I have is 18 containers have been filled, and they are working on containers 19 and 20,” Ecology’s Miller said via email Thursday.
DOE itself did not immediately respond to a request for comment this week regarding the specific number of containers coming out of WTP so far.
“As you may have seen in the employee newsletter and the local newspaper, crews at the Integrated Disposal Facility (IDF) recently received the first two containers of vitrified low-activity tank waste” from the WTP, Wilkinson said in the memo to Central Plateau Cleanup workers.