PHOENIX —The chances of the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state making its first glass from radioactive tank waste by Dec. 31, 2023 is “very low” but reaching that milestone during 2024 is doable, site manager Brian Vance said at a Waste Management Symposia session Tuesday morning.
Vance’s assessment was in response to a question from the floor by Exchange Monitor.
A DOE Office of Environmental Management budget official had previously acknowledged the 2023 goal for Hanford’s Direct-Feed-Low-Activity Waste operations might be missed. The Waste Treatment Plant, being built by Bechtel to vitrify 56 million gallons of tank waste leftover from decades of plutonium production, can start up as late as 2025 and still comply with a modified court settlement.
The settlement gave DOE and its contractors extra time to compensate for schedule delays linked to the COVID-19 pandemic. Resumption of melter heatup at Hanford could be up to two months away, Vance said.
During the session at which Vance spoke, Connie Flohr, DOE’s nuclear environmental cleanup manager for the Idaho National Laboratory, said March remains the startup target—although it could slip into early April— for the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) given the facility’s latest glitch is a small leak of simulant that occurred this week.
As for the IWTU, Flohr said March is still the startup target, although the facility is “the gift that keeps on giving” in terms of glitches. Flohr drew laughter from the crowd when she said IWTU startup might benefit from rubbing “rabbits feet” for good luck.
IWTU operators and engineers are investigating the cause of a small leak of liquid simulant in the Denitration Mineralization Reformer cell detected this week through remote cameras, a DOE spokesperson said in a Thursday email. The facility was in a “warm standby” mode when the leak was detected and the plant is being fully shutdown for further investigation. Radiological operation is expected in late March “or early April,” according to the Thursday email.
Meanwhile at the Savannah River Site near Aiken, S.C., the Salt Waste Processing Facility that started up in October 2020 is so far averaging only 4.5 million gallons per year, about half of its annual target, said Mike Budney, the DOE Office of Environmental Management boss there.
Getting the facility up to full speed will depend on a number of small tweaks, he said, including addressing filter clogging that occurs with the radioactive salt waste.
