A Department of Energy contractor has removed cesium from about 698,000 gallons of radioactive liquid waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state, a DOE spokesperson said Tuesday.
The fourth batch run at the Tank Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) project was completed Oct. 27, the DOE spokesperson said in an email response to an Exchange Monitor inquiry.
But the waste treated by TSCR may still not be suitable for solidification in the nearby Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant slated to come online in 2025,
DOE and its Amentum-led contractor Washington River Protection Solutions are sampling the TSCR-treated waste batches to see if cesium levels are still too high to meet Direct-Feed-Low-Activity-Waste Facilities standards in the waste treatment plant, the spokesperson said.
The contract in October said early sampling of TSCR-treated waste stored in Tank AP-106 showed higher radioactive cesium levels than allowed.
DOE, the contractor and the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in an Oct. 20 report said the high cesium levels could be due to residual waste stuck on the walls of the AP-106 tank, which stored other liquid waste before it was selected as a feeder for the waste treatment plant.
“The Department and its contractor have several options to address reducing the minimal exceedance of the cesium threshold within the AP-106 tank,” the DOE spokesperson said.
Hanford’s underground tank farms store more than 55 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste leftover from decades of plutonium production from the Manhattan Project and the Cold War arms race with the Soviet Union.
