The outcome of long term talks between Washington state and the federal government about liquid waste cleanup at the Hanford site will inform the Department of Energy’s future budget strategy for the sprawling plutonium production complex, the Secretary of Energy said Friday.
Visiting the Hanford site for the first time last week, Jennifer Granholm, now in her second year as secretary of energy, declined to tip DOE’s hand. With talks now in their third year, Granholm would not say whether negotiations were nearing some resolution or whether they might go on long into the future.
“I think it is important that these be candid discussions,” Granholm said.
The purpose of the secretary’s visit, according to DOE, was to give Granholm a chance to familiarize herself with the Hanford’s tank waste cleanup, which aims to solidify 56 million gallons of liquid radioactive tank waste that was leftover from Manhattan Project and Cold War plutonium production and is now stored in 177 underground tanks.
The Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant will get first crack at the waste. Though DOE recently secured the state’s permission to delay treatment of low-level tank waste until August 2025, the agency says it still aims to start up the Direct Feed Low Activity Waste portion of the plant by the end of 2023. The plant will treat the less radioactive liquids in the tanks.
Intermingled with the secretive talks about the vitrification program is the issue of solidifying some Hanford tank waste with grout: essentially, mixing the waste with a concrete-like substance.
DOE has also sent out trial balloons to reclassify much of Hanford’s high-level wastes as low-activity wastes, which would diminish the urgency to build a high-level vitrification facility to deal with Hanford’s more dangerous liquid waste.
So far, the state has publicly opposed that proposal. Construction of a pretreatment plant for the high-level waste melting facility has been dormant since 2012, when DOE ground the project to a halt following technical concerns raised by a contractor whistle-blower.
There are hints that grout could be considered as an alternative to glassify some wastes, with a recent Government Accountability Office report supporting such a move. The state has not publicly supported grout, which would require some additional study by DOE.
Another force in play is numerous Washington government and environmental interests who said DOE’s 2023 Hanford annual budget request of $2.6 billion should have been roughly $3.6 billion. Moreover, many of these people say, the budget should increase to at least $5 billion after that.
A recent GAO report cited a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimate that the entire vitrification project could cost $33 billion to $42 billion. In 2000, the predicted vitrification plant budget’s construction cost was roughly $4 billion.
On Friday, Granholm declined to discuss these intermingling factors’ effects on each other, other than saying the secret talks will affect how DOE will approach potential budget increases in the future.
