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 via Twitter Monday.
Tank operations manager Washington River Protection Solutions has resumed operation of the Tank-Side Cesium Removal System (TSCR) at Hanford, DOE said in the Tweet.
“Since starting operations last year, the system has processed over 400,000 gallons of tank waste,” according to the social media post. TSCR has been offline since July, after pretreating upwards of 380,000 of tank waste over two batch runs during 2022.
The post did not specify when exactly DOE and the Amentum-led contractor resumed operation of TSCR.
The DOE did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday afternoon.
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.
DOE plans to have 1 million gallons of pretreated tank waste ready to run through the Direct-Feed-Low-Activity Waste Facility for glass-making at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant. It will probably be at least 2024 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.
