Two decades after the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF) opened at the Hanford Site, it has racked up impressive numbers, said Scott Sax, president of Washington Closure Hanford, on Wednesday as officials and workers gathered to mark the anniversary.
Almost 18 million tons of waste material have been disposed of at the landfill for mixed low-level radioactive waste. Truck drivers hauling the waste to ERDF have traveled 30 million miles, or the equivalent of 1,200 trips around the world, he said. The landfill covers an area equivalent to about 52 football fields. It has supported the demolition of more than 800 facilities at Hanford and the cleanup of 1,300 waste sites.
On its first day open in July 1996, a single load of about 20 tons of waste was deposited in the landfill. On the landfill’s record day in August 2011, with the help of economic stimulus spending to speed Hanford cleanup, 854 containers were emptied into the landfill, each holding about 20 to 22 tons of waste. With most of river corridor cleanup completed, about 60 to 70 containers are hauled to the landfill daily now. Use could drop a little more through the next two fiscal years, but disposal should eventually ramp up again for environmental remediation of buildings and waste sites in central Hanford.
Much of the waste in ERDF now, 16 million tons, came from cleanup of the 220 square miles of the corridor along nearly 50 miles of the Columbia River at the former Department of Energy plutonium production site. “It is part of the big success of river corridor cleanup,” said Alex Smith, manager of the state Department of Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Program.
Without the on-site disposal facility, the cost to dispose of waste off Hanford would have added millions, if not billions, of dollars to cleanup, said Doug Shoop, deputy manager of the DOE Richland Operations Office. The likely result would have been decisions to cap more of the waste sites scattered across Hanford, rather than digging waste up and hauling it to a landfill, said Dave Einan, an Environmental Protection Agency engineer. “I tell everybody that ERDF is a national treasure,” Sax said.
In addition to contaminated soil, debris, and solid waste, ERDF receives materials such as mercury, asbestos, beryllium, chromium, and lead that can be treated on-site before disposal. Now the landfill is so important to waste remediation that when ERDF shuts down, so does other work at Hanford, Sax said. Washington Closure’s contract will end in September, and before then it will turn over ERDF operations at peak performance to CH2M Plateau Remediation Co., Sax said.
The operating budget for the landfill in this fiscal year is $24 million, but the budget varies by the amount of use planned annually.
ERDF is designed to be expanded as needed to accept waste and could remain in service for decades to come. Existing in-ground disposal cells have about a quarter million tons of capacity remaining. Although DOE is adding capacity by expanding the landfill upward, another disposal cell may need to be added in the next few years, Stacy Charboneau, manager of the Richland Operations Office, said earlier this year.
