A permit modification essential for getting the Hanford site’s Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) in Richland, Wash., ready to treat low-level liquid radioactive waste in 2022 went out for public comment Monday.
The modification would allow Bechtel National to install melting pots required for the Low-Activity Waste Facility (LAW) that is part of DOE’s strategy for treating all of Hanford’s 56 million gallons of Cold War-era chemical and radioactive waste by 2036. The site by the Columbia River produced much of the Pentagon’s plutonium during the Cold War arms race.
Since bringing Bechtel on the job in 2000, DOE has changed its plan for WTP several times. The facility was supposed to start treating all 56 million gallons of waste, low-level and high-level alike, by 2019. But in 2012, DOE all but stopped work on the high-level waste facility and halted work on a pretreatment plant that separates high- and low-level waste from the tank farms before piping it to WTP, where it would be turned into canisters of glass in a process known as vitrification.
But work on the Low-Activity Waste facility continued, and has now progressed to the point where Bechtel is ready to install the LAW melters. Before the company can proceed, however, it needs a new permit from Washington state. Before the state can update the permit — co-held by DOE and Bechtel — the public must have its chance to weigh in.
The public comment period for the modification proposed by the state opened Monday and runs through Aug. 15, according to a notice posted online by the Washington Ecology Department’s Nuclear Waste Program.
For LAW to come online independent of the High-level Waste Facility, it will need its own pretreatment system. This Low-Activity Waste Pretreatment System will be built by Hanford tank farm prime contractor Washington River Protection Solutions under a contract separate from Bechtel’s WTP pact. This facility will allow Bechtel and DOE to begin low-activity waste treatment in 2022 using the so-called Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste approach.
