The Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board will meet on June 21 to discuss the Energy Department’s research into the staying power of the borosilicate glass the agency wants to use to immobilize high-level liquid waste at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.
The meeting will be held at the Courtyard Richland Columbia Point hotel in Richland, the 10-member board said in a May 2 press release. The board is an independent federal agency created in 1987 to evaluate the Energy Department’s nuclear waste treatment plans. Members are selected by the president from a list of candidates submitted by the National Academy of Sciences.
At the meeting, experts from DOE national laboratories will present their work in fiscal years 2015 to 2017 regarding performance and corrosion of borosilicate glass for high-level waste, the board wrote in its press release.
The board plans to post a detailed agenda the week of June 12, according to the release.
Bechtel National, along with subcontractor AECOM, is building the Waste Treatment Plant at Hanford to turn more than 55 million gallons of liquid waste, including briny, low-activity waste and sludgy high-level waste, into safely storable glass cylinders. The company’s Waste Treatment Plant contract is worth about $14.5 billion, a little more than half of which is for starting treatment of low-activity waste by 2023.
High-level waste treatment must start by 2036, a federal judge ruled last year.
