The Department of Energy hopes in April to start construction of the Tank-Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) system at the Hanford Site in Washington state, a vendor said Wednesday.
Tank waste management contractor Washington River Protection Solutions and DOE’s Office of River Protection are requesting temporary authorizations from the Washington state Department of Ecology to start building the concrete pads for the foundation of the TSCR, along with ion exchange columns.
The facility is intended to remove cesium and undissolved solids from low-activity waste stored in Hanford’s underground tanks before the material is vitrified into a glass form at the Waste Treatment Plant. The TSCR will be developed by a subcontractor and located on a 3,000-square-foot site near Hanford’s AP Tank Farm.
Cesium is considered high-level waste, and will need to be removed from the tanks and stored until the vitrification plant is ready to treat that waste type in the 2030s, DOE has said. A WRPS subcontractor hopes to have tank-side removal ready to operate in fiscal 2021.
The Tank-Side Cesium Removal setup will filter waste from a Hanford double-shell tank to remove solids and then process the waste through ion-exchange columns that will remove cesium. The resulting low-level solution will be pumped to a different double-shell tank for storage until it can be sent to the Low-Activity Waste Facility at WTP.
The authorizations are needed to help DOE and Bechtel, which is building the Waste Treatment Plant, meet their legal obligation to begin treating Hanford’s radioactive tank waste by the end of 2023.
In July 2018, WRPS contracted AVANTech at an undisclosed price to design and build the 5 million-gallon TSCR pretreatment facility.
There are roughly 56 million gallons of radioactive waste in 177 underground tanks at Hanford left over from decades of plutonium production at the DOE site. Roughly 90% of that is believed to be low-activity waste.
