The Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) at the Hanford Site in Washington state should start converting low-activity radioactive waste into vitrified glass by the end of 2021, in advance of a legal deadline, the highest-ranking official at the Energy Department Office of Environmental Management said Wednesday.
James Owendoff, principal deputy assistant energy secretary for environmental management, offered the schedule update while testifying Wednesday before the Senate Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee. He was responding to a question on Hanford waste from Sen. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.).
The Waste Treatment Plant will convert up to 56 million gallons of waste currently held in storage tanks into a more stable glass form for disposal. Plant contractor Bechtel National has indicated the project should start treating low-activity radioactive waste by 2022, and it has a court-ordered obligation to do so by the end of 2023. Under the federal court order, treatment of high-level radioactive waste must start at WTP by 2036.
Owendoff largely avoided scrutiny during the hearing on DOE atomic energy defense operations, where committee members focused their questions on new National Nuclear Security Administration chief Lisa Gordon-Hagerty and other witnesses.
During his prepared testimony, Owendoff said the Office of Environmental Management’s $6.6 billion budget request for fiscal 2019 “is the highest for the EM program in a decade” and marks a $93 million increase from the fiscal 2018 request.
The budget request will promote progress in cleaning up tank waste at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Owendoff said later in his testimony. He also cited planned funding for infrastructure improvements at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, which should improve the flow of transuranic waste shipments to the storage mine from other DOE sites. WIPP has been pursuing a number of big ticket items, including installation of a new permanent ventilation system, and seeking approval for an above-ground storage facility for contact-handled transuranic waste
Near-term goals for DOE’s nuclear cleanup office include site preparation for a mercury treatment plant at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.; digging up certain buried waste at the Idaho National Laboratory; and taking “an interim measure” to address chromium groundwater contamination at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Owendoff’s prepared testimony noted LANL will continue work on a chromium plume investigation, which calls for use of extraction and injection wells. It also noted that INL is exhuming targeted buried waste at the ninth and final retrieval area associated with a 2008 cleanup agreement between Idaho, DOE and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
