At least one member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform said last week he supports giving the Hanford Site in Washington state the ability to pursue lower-cost options for disposal of millions of tons of radioactive waste.
Rep. Steve Russell (R-Okla.) said he favors giving the Energy Department extra flexibility at Hanford if it means saving taxpayers billions of dollars, as Government Accountability Office research suggests. He cited the potential to grout the waste, rather than costlier vitrification that would convert the material into a glass form for safe disposal.
“We would be doing great service to the republic” by giving the Energy Department this cost-saving option, Russell said during an April 26 hearing on an annual GAO review into opportunities for significant government cost savings.
Congress would have to authorize grouting as an option at Hanford.
Russell made the comments while questioning U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, and the managing director of GAO’s Natural Resources and Environment Mission Team, Mark Gaffigan, about less expensive options for dealing with low-activity waste at Hanford. The process, immobilizing the waste in a substance akin to concrete, has already been used at separate DOE facilities: including treating 4 million gallons of low-activity waste at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The Hanford Site stores 56 million gallons of high-level and low-activity radioactive waste in underground storage tanks, the byproduct of decades of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear deterrent.
In 2004, Congress gave the Energy Department authority to use grout as a waste-disposal option at virtually all of its cleanup sites except Hanford, where the Washington state government was skeptical about the technology.
Gaffigan noted there were some problems with use of grout for waste disposal at the Rocky Flats weapons facility in Colorado in the 1990s but said the technology has improved significantly since then. Prior GAO research noted a grout material, known as pondcrete, was improperly mixed and did not set properly at Rocky Flats. It resulted in blocks that crumbled and cracked easily.
But in a 2016 GAO report, experts said improvements in grout mean it could be a viable option for the LAW at Hanford.
Energy Department estimates indicate it will cost $53 billion for Waste Treatment Plant facilities needed to vitrify more than 49 million gallons of low-activity waste at Hanford. By comparison, DOE figures indicated it could only cost $5.5 billion to construct treatment facilities and treat the 36 million gallons of the Savannah River Site’s LAW with grout.
The Energy Department has a plan to vitrify between a third and half of the low-activity waste at Hanford but does not currently have a plan for the remainder of the LAW, Gaffigan said. Grout might be an option for the remainder, the GAO official said.
