Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS), the Energy Department’s waste tank farm contractor at the Hanford Site in Washington state, has awarded a subcontract to AVANTech to design and build a pretreatment facility for tank wastes at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP).
The tank-side cesium removal demonstration project is meant to remove both cesium and solid materials from tank waste, the contractor said in a press release Tuesday. The end result would be a low-activity waste stream for vitrification. A WRPS spokesperson said the subcontract price is not being released.
The water treatment company will employ technology similar to a unit used on waste at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The system at Hanford should be operational no later than December 2023, according to Washington River Protection Solutions. The project will “filter waste from one of Hanford’s underground tanks to remove solids and then process the waste through a series of ion-exchange columns that will remove cesium,” the news release states.
Until it is sent to the WTP low-activity waste vitrification facility, the resulting solution will be stored in a double-shell tank system. The press release did not specify how many double-shell tanks will be used in the demonstration project.
The Enerugy Department and its contractor oversee roughly 56 million gallons of high-level and low-activity radioactive waste in 177 underground tanks at Hanford, a byproduct of the site’s history of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The Waste Treatment Plant, being built by Bechtel, is expected to convert much of that waste into a glass form for disposal.
The AVANTech project should pretreat about 5 million gallons of waste to support initial operation of the LAW Facility, WRPS said.
The Energy Department proposed its current strategy in the fall of 2013, designed to allow some low-activity waste to be treated before all technical challenges are resolved with WTP, according to a 2017 Government Accountability Office report. Under a federal court order, processing of low-activity waste must begin no later than 2023, with the plant fully operational by 2036.
Washington River Protection Solutions is prime contractor for DOE’s Office of River Protection, responsible for managing Hanford’s underground tanks and preparing the waste for vitrification. The company is a venture comprised of AECOM and Atkins, with Orano as the primary contractor.
AVANTech’s website describes it as an industrial water treatment solutions provider. It has offices in Columbia, S.C., and Knoxville, Tenn. The company has provided cesium removal technology at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi reactors in Japan.
