Long-idled design work resumed this summer on the high-level waste portion of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, according to the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
After August workshops, prime contractor Bechtel National and DOE created what they call the “HLW [High Level Waste] Firm the Foundation Team” to use lessons from the plant’s Low Activity Waste facility to guide completion of the high-level design, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) said in a Nov. 11 weekly report.
The team consists of subject matter experts from DOE’s Hanford Site in Richland, Wash., as well as Bechtel, a DOE spokesperson said in a Thursday email. The team includes a steering committee and about a dozen sub-teams working on “an optimal path forward.”
The team “is moving the project away from the previous design-build approach to developing a request for proposal for design completion, followed by construction and commissioning,” according to the DNFSB.
Some design work on resolving technical issues resumed in 2017, according to DOE.
Two large facilities at the Waste Treatment plant, one for pretreatment of the tank waste and for treatment of the high-level radioactive waste, have been on hold for a decade while DOE addresses safety questions about build up gas in pipes and vessels that pose an explosion risk at the plant.
The work was held up in 2012 by then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu in order to allow for design changes to mitigate the explosion risk.
Construction of the facility was about 43% complete in September 2012, according to DOE, which intends to restart actual construction in fiscal 2025 or 2026, once engineering is substantially complete, according to information shared Thursday by the spokesperson.
The High-Level Waste Facility has a total of 56 process systems, according to the DOE spokesperson. “Currently, design of 13 systems is less than 60% complete, 37 systems are between 60% and 90% complete, and six systems have met the 90% design standard.”
In each of fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022, DOE’s Office of River Protection at Hanford received $25 million for the high-level vitrification facility at the Waste Treatment Plant, an amount that would spike to $316 million under the Joe Biden administration’s budget request for fiscal 2023. This week’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act, would have that figure swell to $359 million.
This facility is designed to receive high-level waste from underground tanks at Hanford and solidify it into a glass form. The canisters of vitrified waste will be stored on-site until a final Yucca Mountain-style geological repository is available, according to the DOE.
There are 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical tank waste at Hanford left over from decades of plutonium production.
While 90% of the volume is low-level, the high-level waste accounts for most of the radionuclides, according to DOE.
The Waste Treatment Plant is supposed to start turning high-level tank waste into glass in 2033, under a U.S. District Court consent decree. Last week a DOE Environmental Management budget official said the feds might miss their December 2023 target for turning the first low-level tank waste into glass.
