The National Academies invites public comment between now and June 12 on an ongoing federal study of supplemental treatment options, such as grout, for the low-activity waste at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state that won’t be converted into glass by the Waste Treatment Plant.
The public comment notification was sent out Wednesday by both DOE and the Washington state Department of Ecology.
While the Waste Treatment Plant built by Bechtel should start converting low-level radioactive tank waste into a stable glass form by the end of 2023, government reports have said the plant might only handle half of the low-level waste left over from decades of plutonium production, and something must be done about the rest. There is 56 million gallons of waste in underground tanks at Hanford.
Low-activity waste accounts for most of the volume but less radionuclides than the high-activity waste. Vitrification of high-level waste at the plant won’t start until the 2030s and plans could be modified by long-running closed-door talks on Hanford cleanup by DOE, the state and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Congress in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal 2021 assigned a committee appointed by the National Academies’ Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board to take public comment on the second study into the subject by the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina.
In gathering public input, the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board will kick off three days of livestreamed meetings starting 7:30 a.m. Pacific Time on Tuesday April 26 from the Holiday Inn in Richland, Wash. Over the course of the sessions, the board will hear testimony from Washington Ecology, the Oregon Department of Energy, tribal nations, the Hanford Advisory Board, Hanford Communities, the Energy Communities Alliance, and the Tri-City Development Council among others.
Click here to register for the webcast, download the 191-page analysis by the Savannah River National Laboratory or file public comments. Questions should be emailed to Leslie Beauchamp, [email protected].
During a meeting last October, Oregon and Washington officials said while grouting the excess waste and shipping it out-of-state is a future option, it should not distract DOE to the more urgent task of getting direct-feed-low-activity-waste vitrification going in late 2023.
