Hanford Site Flips a Lid

Bechtel National has flipped its lid — a 28-ton melter lid for the Hanford Site Waste Treatment Plant’s Low-Activity Waste Facility (LAW). The lid, for one of the facility’s melters, had been upside down to allow for placement of the refractory, a cement-like insulation. To turn the lid right side up without damaging it, a custom-made steel frame measuring 15 feet by 25 feet was used. “It performed flawlessly,” said Bud Maple, mechanical superintendent for LAW. The lid, one of two that will be placed on LAW’s 300-ton melters, measures 12 feet wide, 22 feet long, and 16 inches thick. Numerous holes allow for piping and instrumentation into the melter, which will heat radioactive waste and glass-forming material to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit to produce a stable glass waste form. The lid will be welded onto the melter this spring and then work will begin on installing the refractory material in the second melter lid. The melters will be the largest of their kind when they are finished, about five times larger than the melters used to vitrify waste at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. LAW could be vitrifying waste by 2022.