Hanford has pretreated nearly 800K gallons of waste, DOE manager says in update

Personnel at the Hanford site in Washington state have prepared nearly 800,000 gallons of liquid radioactive waste for conversion into glass form in 2025, the site’s federal manager said Tuesday.

Contractor Washington River Protection Solutions has started its fifth batch run at the Tank Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) project, Department of Energy site manager Brian Vance told the meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board in a wide-ranging presentation that touched on other issues affecting Hanford and the Bechtel National-built Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.

After the fourth batch run ended around Oct. 27, work crews had their quickest maintenance outage yet, installing the new ion exchange column and doing other related tasks in 21 days, Vance said.

Some of the pretreated waste has shown more cesium than allowed under waste acceptance criteria for the Waste Treatment Plant, but DOE and its Amentum-led contractor are making progress toward fixing the problem, which stems from the AP-106 tank where waste is stored before being run through the Direct-Feed Low Activity Waste Facilities at the Waste Treatment Plant, Vance said.

In the plant, the liquid waste is heated to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit and mixed with glass-forming materials before being poured into steel containers. The process is sometimes called vitrification. 

The direct-feed facility at the vitrification plant this week rolled out its first canister filled with non-radioactive test glass, Vance said. The first test glass was superheated using the first melter that was successfully tested in October. “We still have melter 2 heat-up that will probably start in the January time frame after we resolve a couple of other issues,” he said.

Commissioning of the Waste Treatment Plant over the next 18 months or so means cleanup of the old plutonium production complex will become an around-the-clock operation, Vance said. 

Some of the offshoot effects of that transition, Vance said, include providing nonstop care onsite. Inomedic Health Applications, Hanford’s new occupational medical contractor, will be responsible for that. The contractor will formally take over from HPM Corp. around Jan. 1.

The Hanford Site manager also said that under the current fiscal 2024 continuing budget resolution Hanford cleanup continues to be funded at about fiscal 2023 levels through Jan. 19.