A contractor for the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state has, after an extended outage, restarted a cesium pretreatment pilot project critical to waste solidification at the site, the DOE said this week.
Tank operations manager Washington River Protection Solutions has resumed operation of the Tank-Side Cesium Removal System (TSCR) at Hanford, DOE said in a Monday Tweet.
More than 25,000 gallons of waste has been treated in the past week, which means 406,000 gallons of radioactive liquid waste has been treated since startup in January 2022, DOE said in a Tuesday press release.
“The cesium removal system is a demonstration project, and this is the first time we are treating tank waste on an industrial scale at Hanford,” said Delmar Noyes, assistant manager for tank farms for Hanford’s Office of River Protection. “We are learning, strengthening our processes and adding improvements that we can use in future, similar systems.”
TSCR has been offline since July, after pretreating upwards of 380,000 of tank waste over two batch runs during 2022.
During the outage, crews have worked on issues such as improving procedures for replacing ion exchange columns once they become laden with cesium. Such replacements are needed periodically. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board had said the work practices for such replacements did not pass muster with American Society of Mechanical Engineers safety standards.
The $135-million project removes radioactive cesium and solids from liquid waste, a prerequisite for solidifying the waste using Hanford’s just-built Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.
DOE plans to have 1 million gallons of pretreated tank waste ready to run through the Direct-Feed-Low-Activity Waste portion of the plant before the facility switches on. It could be 2025 before the vitrification plant starts operation, Brian Vance, DOE’s Hanford site manager, said in February at an industry conference.
In 2018, the DOE contractor inked a subcontract with AVANTech to design and build TSCR, building upon technology used at the Fukushima reactor cleanup in Japan. The TSCR pilot project has a five-year design life and DOE is already making plans for a higher-capacity successor, which could be ready for operation in fiscal 2027.
