Amentum-led Washington River Protection Solutions is seeking a subcontractor to help ensure the quality of its cesium-removal system for low-level radioactive tank waste at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) is looking for a subcontractor to help with the “procurement, fabrication, and testing of replacement ion exchange columns” for the Tank Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) project at Hanford, according to a Tuesday procurement notice.
Oversight of ion exchange column quality will be done at the AVANTech fabrication facility in Columbia, S.C., according to the notice.
New ion exchange columns are needed at the TSCR system every few months. Fabrication of these components started in fiscal 2021 and the quality assurance work will be needed in fiscal 2023 and 2024, according to the notice.
“Subcontractors have been part of the process for performing quality assurance work for the fabrication of Tank Side Cesium Removal system Ion Exchange Columns and will continue to do so as this subcontract is rebid and awarded,” said a WRPS spokesperson Thursday.
The notice comes as WRPS is preparing to brief the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in January over some safety concerns raised by the watchdog panel. TSCR removes cesium and solids from tank waste in preparation for the Direct Feed Low Activity Waste program to turn low-level waste into glass at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.
DOE and contractor Bechtel, builder of the vitrification plant, hope to start operating the plant by the end of 2023, although a revised court order gives them until 2025 to meet that milestone due to time lost from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The TSCR quality assurance work ranges from oversight of everything from welds to documentation, according to the procurement notice statement of work.
Currently in an extended outage expected to last until the New Year, TSCR has pretreated 380,000 gallons of waste during two batch runs. The treated waste is held in a separate tank until it can be immobilized in glass, according to WRPS.
For its part, DOE would not go as far as identifying a narrow timeline for resumption of TSRC operation. “We are ensuring the process and procedure improvements are captured and implemented throughout each stage of the TSCR demonstration project, and look forward to resuming TSCR operations when the team, equipment, processes, and procedures are ready,” a DOE spokesperson said via email Thursday.
