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 enclosures that include 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. It is due to begin operations in fiscal 2021, which begins on Oct. 1 of this year.
The TSCR has already been built and assembled at the AVANTech facility in Richland, Wash., and will be installed at AP Farm. The ion exchange columns are already inside the enclosures.
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. The new system is officially a demonstration project to establish the viability of the operation. Assuming TSCR testing shows it can do the job, other tank-side facilities could eventually be built, an observer said.
The Tank-Side Cesium Removal setup will filter waste from a Hanford double-shell tank to remove solids and then process the waste through the ion-exchange columns to extract 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.
