By next week, the Energy Department and Washington River Protection Solutions must let the state of Washington know if they can safely inspect the inside of the leaky double-shell tank they just emptied at the Hanford Site.
On Feb. 15, DOE tank farms contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) told the Washington Department of Ecology the company had emptied the leaky Tank AY-102 as much as it could using the two draining technologies now at its disposal.
That triggered a legally binding requirement to report back to Ecology within 35 days about whether WRPS could safely get inside AY-102 and assess the damage to the tank. If DOE decides it cannot inspect the tank, AY-102 could be closed. The agency has hinted, but not officially determined, that closure is likely.
However, if DOE can inspect AY-102 and drain it further, the door is open to repair the tank, which has held liquid waste left over from Cold War plutonium production since about 1970.
Tank AY-102 was once slated to be the feed tank for the massive Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) Bechtel National is building at Hanford to turn the site’s 56 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste into more easily storable glass canisters. However, WRPS has cut bait on that plan and now intends to pipe waste into WTP from Hanford’s underground tank farms via the AP-107 tank, company executives said last week at the annual Waste Management Symposium in Phoenix.
DOE estimates emptying Tank AY-102 will cost more than $40 million. While an official determination remains pending, the tank likely cannot be repaired, Chris Kemp of DOE’s Office of River Protection told members of the Hanford Advisory Board in January.
A spokesperson for the Office of River Protection did not reply to a request for comment Tuesday.
