HANFORD SITE, WASH. — Workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site filled its first canister with melted non-radioactive glass last week, the site’s leaders announced Monday.
“It was not obvious to everyone except this team that we’d be here today,” said the Department of Energy’s Hanford Manager Brian Vance at a Monday ceremony at the site’s low-activity Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant.
Hanford is expected to begin melting radioactive wastes together with glass flakes sometime between April and June 2025 at 21 metric tons a day, Vance said. The first of the plant’s two melters poured its first glass cylinder in late October. The cylinder was deposited last week into a 7.5-foot-tall, 4-foot-diameter stainless steel canister. Within is slightly less than 1,800 gallons of cooled, greenish glass weighing 6.8 metric tons.
Both of Washington’s U.S. Senators, and the congressman from the district nearest Hanford, appeared by video to mark the milestone.
Hanford has 56 million gallons of radioactive waste in 177 leak-prone underground tanks. By volume, most of this is the less radioactive, low-activity waste that will be treated first. The tanks are arguably the most radiologically and chemically contaminated site in the Western Hemisphere.
Hanford plans to start testing its second low-activity-waste melter in a few weeks. The two melters are expected to have lifespans of about five years, with two backup melters already on order to replace them.
DOE and Bechtel say 2025 is the current target for regular operation of the Direct-Feed-Low-Activity Waste Facilities. Pre-pandemic the startup date was expected by the end of 2023. High-level waste vitrification at the plant is currently scheduled a decade from now. DOE estimates it will take until 2070 or so to clean up all the liquid waste.
