Comments Sought by DOE on Draft Environmental Review for 2,000-Gallon Test Bed

The Department of Energy is taking public comment on a draft environmental assessment of its 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 14-day public comment period on the Test Best Initiative, officially started Saturday and runs through Sept 3, 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. But 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, according to the package of information submitted to the Washington Department of Ecology.

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.