Cleaning up the former plutonium production complex at the Hanford Site in Washington state could be even more costly and take longer than expected, a Department of Energy official said Wednesday during a virtual meeting.
The forecast is from DOE’s ninth and latest revision of the River Protection Project System Plan. Brian Harkins, the agency’s deputy assistant manager for tank farms at Hanford, displayed multiple slides about System Plan 9, as it’s called for short, during Wednesday’s online meeting of the Hanford Advisory Group.
System Plan 9 anticipates that removing chemical and radioactive waste from all Hanford’s single-shell tanks at Hanford will take until 2061, and that all tank waste treatment will conclude by 2066 at a lifecycle cost of between $107 billion and $192 billion.
That’s three years longer and $3 billion more than what DOE forecast three years ago in System Plan 8, Harkins said. The roughly 300-page System Plan 9 evaluates DOE’s current baseline approach and alternative scenarios for carrying out Hanford’s tank waste treatment and disposal program.
And the dates and cost estimates included in the latest edition of the plan are “generally considered to be optimistic,” Harkins said.
The latest report shows that tank treatment is even more complex than what was previously assumed, Dan McDonald, the Washington Ecology tank waste disposal project manager, told the board during Wednesday’s meeting.
System Plan revisions are supposed to be filed with the Washington Ecology department every three years on Oct. 31. The latest revision arrived two weeks late, on Nov. 13, because of the pandemic. Ecology allowed DOE some reprieve from the deadline because of COVID-19, Harkins said.
The Hanford Site has 56 million gallons of waste stored in 177 underground tanks, 149 of which are single-shell tanks. Many of the single-shells have leaked over the years. System Plan 9, like earlier versions of the document, includes an analysis of the five most likely tanks to spring a leak in the near future, Harkins said. Plan 9 also concludes that adding new tanks would not really aid the cleanup mission.The addition of new tanks was an idea put forth last year by the Washington Department of Ecology.
By the end of 2023, Hanford is expected to start feeding low-activity tank waste into the Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel National. The plant will convert the radioactive material into a glass-like substance for disposal.
