As the top boss at the Department of Energy’s nuclear cleanup office promised last week, crews at the Hanford Site in Washington state are heating up a giant melter designed to solidify radioactive tank waste into a glass form at the $17-billion Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.
The Tri-City Herald newspaper in Richland, Wash., reported Monday that DOE began heating up the 300-ton melter on Saturday.
“This week we are heating up the first melter in the Low-Activity Waste Vitrification facility as we prepare to begin melting glass in that facility” by the end of next year, DOE Office of Environmental Management senior adviser William (Ike) White said last Wednesday, Oct. 5, at a conference in Knoxville, Tenn.
The DOE and Bechtel, which is building and commissioning the long-awaited vitrification plant, have said they still expect to start turning low-level radioactive tank waste into glass form by the end of 2023, although December 2020 revisions to a consent decree due to delays from the COVID-19 pandemic give the parties until sometime in 2024.
“This is a truly momentous occasion, more than 20 years in the making, and has been a big haul for our program,” and even more so for DOE and its contractors, Ryan Miller, spokesperson for the state regulator Washington Department of Ecology, said in a Monday email reply to Exchange Monitor.
“Startup of the Low-Activity Waste Vitrification Plant is a crucial milestone to begin treating the 56 million gallons of Hanford’s tank waste and reducing the environmental threat that waste poses,” Miller said.
A Government Accountability Office report in June said spare parts for melters could be a problem. “Once the facilities’ two melters are operational, there will be no spare melter available for replacement if one of the melters fails before 2025, at which time a spare melter that is currently being fabricated is scheduled to be completed,” according to the report.
The melters are supposed to eventually reach 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit and DOE has been working toward the startup for over a year.
