Rebutting a recent letter from Washington state and the Yakama Tribe, local officials from communities around the Hanford Site this week defended the Department of Energy’s 2019 policy change on high-level waste.
In a letter dated Wednesday, mayors and other officials from Benton and Franklin Counties said they are disappointed to see the state, the tribe and various public-interest groups demand that DOE reverse the new federal interpretation of what radioactive material must be treated as high-level waste before the change “has even been evaluated at Hanford.”
DOE’s current policy holds that some waste previously deemed high-level poses no more risk than low-level or mixed waste. To test the notion on a small scale, the agency in 2020 conducted a pilot program that sent eight gallons of recycled wastewater to Waste Control Specialists’ commercial disposal site in Andrews, Texas from the Savannah River Site’s Site H Tank Farm in South Carolina.
The recycled wastewater, which passed through the tank farm and Savannah River’s Defense Waste Processing Facility, is a combination of several diluted liquid waste streams, mostly condensates that result from solidifying liquid tank waste, according to DOE’s finding of no significant impact from August. The wastewater also includes process samples, sample line flushes and cleaning solutions from the decontamination process.
Previously classified as high-level waste, Waste Control Specialists mixed the eight gallons of recycled wastewater with grout in Texas and disposed of the resulting mixture there. DOE, in the August finding of no significant impact, said this mixture would be Class B low-level waste. The wastewater pilot could clear the way for DOE to dispose of up to 10,000 gallons of wastewater from the Savannah River Site using essentially the same process.
In their letter to Granholm, the Hanford locals called the pilot disposal a positive development for their fellow nuclear neighbors in South Carolina, because the waste “is now permanently stored outside of South Carolina.”
The Hanford-area officials “do not believe our state government speaks for or represents the best interests of Tri-Cities on Hanford-related matters.” The state’s fondness of “the status quo at Hanford, combined with delays caused by their regulatory approach, only serves to increase the risks to our community,” the locals said.
Last week, in a letter to new Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm, the Washington state government and others asked DOE to rescind its recent decision to enable reclassification of some high-level waste, including waste in the Hanford Site’s underground tanks. Signees included the Washington Department of Ecology, Washington Attorney General Robert Ferguson (D), the Yakama Indian Nation and three Hanford-focused citizen watchdog groups.
“We believe this rule lays the groundwork for the Department to abandon significant amounts of radioactive waste in Washington State precipitously close to the Columbia River, which is the lifeblood of the Pacific Northwest, creating a long-term risk of harm to the residents of the Pacific Northwest and the natural resources critical to the region,” the state government and the citizens groups wrote in their letter.
Hanford has 56 million gallons of highly radioactive wastes in 177 leak-prone underground tanks a few miles from the Columbia River. Hanford’s single-shell tanks, the older kind of tank on site, contain a mixture of saltcake and slurry or sludge that is both radioactive and chemically hazardous, according to the Washington Department of Ecology.
Just before inauguration day, DOE essentially activated an interpretive rule from 2019 that lets the feds re-designate some high-level radioactive wastes leftover from nuclear-weapons production. DOE then incorporated its 2019 interpretive rule within Order 435.1-1 on Jan. 19, the day before President Joe Biden’s inauguration.
The changes could allow Hanford to fill some of its underground tanks with cement-like grout instead of converting the liquid waste inside them into more stable glass cylinders — an expensive process that could take decades.
By law, DOE may reclassify only waste from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel for defense activities. That would include waste created at Hanford during its prolific plutonium production days during the Cold War. DOE believes the new approach can lower the nation’s nuclear cleanup bill substantially, with much of the savings coming from Hanford.
However, Congress has so far blocked DOE from applying the agency’s reinterpretation to Hanford waste.
