Key parts of a pretreatment system for the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant should hold up over decades, Department of Energy bosses and a contractor from the Hanford Site in Washington state told the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board last month.
Managers from DOE and Washington River Protection Solutions told the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) that ion exchange column connections at the Tank Side Cesium Removal project should work over a 50-year lifespan, according to a recent DNFSB staff report.
The Hanford managers also said Washington River Protection Solutions’ corrective actions “are sufficient to address the potential causes of the damage,” to the threaded connections or couplers used to attach the ion exchange columns to the system, according to the report.
The board had expressed concerns that friction between metal surfaces could result in damaged threads resulting in leaks.
The routine weekly one-page report, dated Dec. 23 and recently posted to the board’s website, did not go into any detail about presentations at the briefing requested by the safety board. DNFSB Chair Joyce Connery requested a briefing in October on safety concerns surrounding the Tank Side Cesium Removal project.
After the first two batch runs last year, which pretreated 380,000 gallons of low-activity liquid waste, the Tank Side Cesium Removal Project has been in an extended outage. A Hanford manager told the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board last week the pretreatment facility should resume operations early this year.
Managers for DOE at Hanford plan to use the facility to pretreat 1 million gallons of low-level radioactive tank waste prior to startup of vitrification that the agency hopes will be as early as December.
Due to delays from the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the feds have legal authority to go into 2025 before starting to make glass at the Waste Treatment Plant. A deputy manager at Hanford and a budget official with DOE’s Office of Environmental Management have recently suggested vit plant startup might slide beyond 2023.
