An advocacy group wants the Department of Energy to provide at least 60 days, rather than 14, for public comment on a draft environmental assessment of a federal plan to grout up to 2,000 gallons of low-activity tank waste at the Hanford Site in Washington and ship the material out of state.
The current 14-day public comment period on the Test Best Initiative, officially started Saturday, Aug. 1, and runs through today, Sept 3, but in comments filed Wednesday, Hanford Challenge called the two-week period “unacceptable.”
The comments submitted by Hanford Challenge Executive Director Tom Carpenter also said DOE should hold a public hearing on the matter and expand the environmental assessment into a more extensive environmental impact statement.
“The magnitude of dangerous radioactive and non-radioactive hazardous waste envisioned to be processed by DOE at Perma-Fix Northwest over the next 45 years, if realized, could well exceed the current regulatory capabilities of Washington State and the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] to ensure safety of workers and the public,” Carpenter said in the written comments.
If the 2,000-gallon test works, the DOE envisions a next-phase that could entail grouting of upwards of 300,000 gallons of Hanford tank waste. It is an option DOE is studying to speed cleanup of the former plutonium production reservation, which now is the largest nuclear-weapons cleanup in the United States.
Hanford’s site manager Brian Vance said in an Aug. 17 letter to various tribes as well as environmental agencies in the states of Washington, Oregon, Utah, Texas and Tennessee.
The National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) review “is being done in conjunction with a waste incidental to reprocessing determination involving the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” Vance wrote.
The DOE proposal involves a long-anticipated follow-up to a lab-scale test in 2017 where three gallons of liquid, low-activity test samples were treated at Hanford’s 222-S Lab and grouted at the local Perma-Fix Environmental Services Northwest plant before being sent to Waste Control Specialists in Texas for disposal.
The roughly 56 million gallons of waste left at Hanford from decades of plutonium production consists of about 90% low-activity waste by volume, which has only 10% of the total radionuclides.
The Waste Treatment Plant, being built by Bechtel, is expected to start converting some low-activity waste into a glass form by the end of 2023. The state, DOE, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others have also renegotiated legally binding cleanup deadlines at Hanford to give the Waste Treatment Plant more time to begin processing low level waste, if needed.
Still, DOE expects the plant will be able to handle no more than 60% of the total low-activity tank waste. The Test Bed Initiative is being studied as an alternative for the remaining low-activity waste.
Under the proposed demonstration project, DOE would separate and pretreat about 2,000 gallons of low-activity liquid tank waste, also known as supernate, from Hanford tank SY-101 through use of pumping, filtering and an ion exchange column assembly, DOE has said.
After pretreatment, DOE could classify the grouted waste as mixed low-level waste, qualifying the material for disposal at a commercial facility such as Waste Control Specialists or EnergySolutions’ site in Clive, Utah. The Hanford waste could either be treated 25 miles away at the Perma-Fix facility near Richland, Wash., or transported to the Perma-Fix DSSI facility in Kingston, Tenn., a 2,500-mile trip, according to the draft assessment. Other options include doing both the treatment and disposal at the final destination.
In 2014, Texas modified the license for the Waste Control Specialists Federal Waste Facility to increase disposal limits for substances commonly found in Hanford tank waste, according to a DOE fact sheet filed with the NEPA documents. This created a potential disposal option for certain Hanford tank waste.
Early study by the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina assessed the viability of disposing of Hanford low-level tank waste at the Texas site and concluded DOE could accelerate cleaning and closing Hanford tanks if disposal facilities like the Texas site were considered inbounds as a final destination.
