Two citizen groups in Washington state that track the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site said Friday they were not surprised to see a delay in cold commissioning of the multibillion-dollar plant to turn liquid radioactive waste into glass.

DOE said last Thursday it expects to miss the Aug. 1 target for starting cold commissioning, which involves making glass from non-radioactive liquid, at the Bechtel-built Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.

DOE also said it has received a four-month extension from the Washington Department of Ecology for the consent decree milestone.

“I have been hearing rumors” of melter equipment problems at the plant, said Nikolas Peterson, executive director of Seattle-based Hanford Challenge, in an email reply to Exchange Monitor. DOE’s Hanford Site manager, Brian Vance, cited “relatively minor equipment issues” in a memo to the state last week.

“I find the use of the word ‘relatively’ in their statement as to the equipment issue interesting,” Peterson said.

In a May report on Tri-Party Agreement issues, DOE said its Aug. 1, 2024, milestone for cold commissioning was “at risk,” said Gerry Pollet, executive director of Seattle-based Heart of America Northwest. Pollet was also responding to an Exchange Monitor query. DOE briefed the state on its setback in late May, the agency said.

DOE has also said it still expects to start converting some of Hanford’s less-radioactive waste into glass starting in mid-2025, a long-awaited mission that would begin after the milestone called hot commissioning.

Pollet said it would be “[h]ardly a shock that there may be delays to the hot startup.”

Hanford’s underground tanks store roughly 56 million gallons of liquid radioactive and hazardous waste. The liquid waste is left over from decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons during both World War II and the subsequent arms race with the Soviet Union.