By John Stang
OLYMPIA, WASH. — The Hanford Site faces an extremely tight schedule to select both a technology and a destination for low-level radioactive waste intended to be immobilized in grout, the site’s top lawyer said here this week.
“It is an aggressive timeline” said DOE’s chief Hanford counsel Mark Silberstein on the tight deadline to nail down both a grouting technology and disposal destination by the end of December, little more than five months from now.
Silberstein spoke Wednesday during a public meeting about changes to Hanford’s cleanup schedule. The Department of Energy, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington Department of Ecology all attended the event, along with about 20 members of the public.
The session was part of a public comment period running through Sept. 1 on the proposed changes on the site’s legal cleanup obligations, reached after four years of closed-door talks among the three departments.
The proposed changes call for Hanford to use grout, concrete-like material, from the first time to deal with some of the low-activity wastes found among the 56 million gallons of radioactive wastes found in the site’s 177 underground tanks. Most of the volume of the tank waste is of the low-activity variety, which relative to what Hanford calls high-level waste is less radioactive.
Not much research has been completed on what grouting technology should be used at Hanford.
So far, Perma-Fix Environmental Services, Atlanta, Ga., has done one test run, in 2017, with three gallons of tank waste, successfully trucking that small sample to Waste Control Specialists’ disposal facility in Andrews County, Texas. The planned second test run, involving 2,000 gallons, is on hold pending formal adoption of the cleanup-schedule changes, sometimes called the holistic agreement.
Gerald Pollet, executive director of the watchdog organization Heart of America Northwest, said picking a destination should include transportation studies involving potential accidents of trucks taking grouted wastes through cities. Those analyses take a long time to complete, Pollet said, and such an accident would pose a major economic risk.
Among the proposed changes in the holistic agreement are:
- Leaving intact the August 2025 deadline to start solidifying some of Hanford’s low-activity waste in glass-like cylinders using the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, DOE’s first resort for treating this kind of waste.
- The start-up date to a high-level waste waste treatment plant officially remains 2033, with wiggle room to change that if needed.
- Wastes from an additional 22 of the 85 single-shell tanks central in Hanford’s 200 West Area will be removed by 2040.
- One or more tanks, totaling 1 million gallons of capacity, will be built in the 200 West Area by 2040. Two pipelines will be finished between 2030 and 2036 to move liquid wastes and slurried wastes to central Hanford’s 200 East Area, which is where the waste treatment plant is, from the 200 West Area.
- DOE agreeing not to pursue an effort to reclassify some of Hanford’s high-level wastes into low-activity wastes.
Andy Fitz, of the Washington Attorney General’s Office, and DOE’s Hanford Manager Brian Vance acknowledged that the current legal deadlines of turning tank all wastes into glass in the 2040s won’t be met and will have to be delayed and nailed down at a later time.