Personnel at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site recently tested a drainage system that will funnel byproducts of liquid waste cleanup to an outbuilding from the Low Activity Waste Facility, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said this week.
The system includes large tanks and miles of pipes inside the Low-Activity Waste Facility — which Bechtel National is building as part of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant — and will collect and transport contaminated liquid to the Effluent Management Facility: the roughly $370-million outbuilding the agency finished earlier this year, and a critical cog in the system that DOE hopes will start solidifying the most voluminous portion of Hanford’s Cold War liquid waste by 2023 or so.
The Effluent Management Facility includes 77 systems spread across four buildings, all of which have been handed over to the Waste Treatment Plant management team for commissioning. According to the tri-party agreement governing cleanup at Hanford, the Effluent Management Facility has to wrap up its cold commissioning by Aug. 15, 2023.
The Low Activity Waste Facility itself is supposed to begin solidifying radioactive tank waste at Hanford into a solid glass form by the end of 2023 — a date DOE has so far stuck too, despite securing at least several month’s grace from Washington State in December after the COVID-19 pandemic slowed work at the site in 2020.
Meanwhile by December, Hanford crews will be gradually heating up the first melter at the Low Activity Waste Facility to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit. The effluent plumbing collects liquid generated from the melter’s off-gas system. From there, the liquids go to the Effluent Management Facility’s processing building, where the excess water is evaporated and sent to Hanford’s nearby Liquid Effluent Retention Facility. Any remaining waste concentrate is looped back into the vitrification process, according to a DOE website.
There is roughly 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, most of it low-level, at Hanford left over from decades of plutonium production and the waste is currently stored in underground tanks, some of which have leaked.
