The Department of Energy expects it will be early 2023 before an Amentum-led contractor starts pretreating its third batch of low-level radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
An ongoing planned outage could take a few more months, a DOE spokesperson said by email Wednesday. That is longer than the agency’s characterization in August, when it said the planned outage should wrap up in weeks.
Tank farms prime Washington River Protection Solutions continues to update safety documents and make upgrades to equipment at the Tank Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) project since the second batch run ended in late July, a DOE spokesperson said by email Wednesday.
The contractor is also working on improved procedures for disconnecting ion exchange columns once they become loaded with cesium, the spokesperson said. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board will receive a DOE briefing within 90 days on what’s being done to minimize damage to threaded ChemJoint connections that attach the columns to TSCR.
Operation of the TSCR system will start back up when the contractor team, the equipment, and the revised procedures are ready, according to the DOE spokesperson.
The TSCR project, which uses similar technology to a system at the DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina, employs ion exchange columns to filter out undissolved solids and radioactive cesium from liquid waste before sending the stream to the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant to be solidified into glass.
So far, TSCR has pretreated 380,000 gallons of waste during two batch runs. The first occurred between January and March and pretreated 198,000 gallons while the second one from June to July handled 182,000 gallons according to DOE.
The agency’s goal is to have a million gallons of pretreated tank waste ready to run through the Direct-Feed-Low-Activity Waste Facility at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, for conversion into glass, starting by the end of 2023. Because of delays attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic, an amended federal court order allows DOE to bump the startup of the plant until early 2024.
The Hanford Site has about 56 million gallons of radioactive waste left over from decades of plutonium production for the U.S. military complex.
