The first of up to two dozen containers of highly radioactive sludge was trucked Monday morning to storage in the center of the Hanford Site in Washington state.
Workers have for nine years been preparing for the sludge transfer from underwater containers in the K West Reactor Basin, which is just 400 yards from the Columbia River, to dry storage at T Plant. The first storage container was filled earlier this month.
Hanford cleanup contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. plans to continue filling storage containers and then transporting them inside shipping casks to T Plant over the next year. The Department of Energy has a legally binding Tri-Party Agreement milestone to transfer all 35 cubic yards of sludge to T Plant by the end of 2019 for temporary storage. It must by 2022 select treatment technology to prepare the waste for disposal.
Planning for the transfer began in 2009, following consolidation of the sludge from underwater containers in the K East Reactor Basin into the K West Reactor Basin. The sludge was the result of irradiated fuel that was stored in the K Reactor basins at the end of the Cold War rather than being processed to remove plutonium. Before the fuel was removed from the basins in 2004, it degraded and mixed with dirt in the pool to form sludge. The sludge contains fuel corrosion particles, bits of metal, and dirt.
The sludge containers are being stored in the below-ground cells of T Plant, which have been equipped with secondary containment basins and leak detectors. T Plant was used to chemically separate plutonium from irradiated fuel.
