Utah-based Petersen Inc. has scored two subcontracts worth $37.8 million to provide stainless-steel containers and an extra melter for the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) being built at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
Plant construction and operations prime Bechtel National announced the award Tuesday.
The vitrification plant will convert much of Hanford’s 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, generated by decades of plutonium production for nuclear weapons, into a glass form for disposal. Processing of low-activity waste (LAW) is scheduled to begin by 2023, followed by treatment of high-level waste no later than 2036.
Petersen’s engineered containers are 7-feet tall and 4-feet wide and will be filled with molten glass containing simulated and real radioactive waste during the vitrification plant’s hot commissioning phase, Bechtel said. The spare melter will be on standby for whenever one of the current melters need replacement.
The Low-Activity Waste Facility at WTP already has a pair of melters that will heat waste and glass-forming materials to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit before the mix is poured into stainless steel containers for permanent storage. Bechtel and the Energy Department expect about 1.75 million gallons of low-activity tank waste will be vitrified into the glass form each year.
“These specially engineered stainless-steel containers and the spare melter are critical to our ability to complete hot commissioning in just a few years,” Valerie McCain, a Bechtel National principal vice president and WTP project director, said in a press release.
Construction of the Low-Activity Waste Facility is almost complete and systems startup testing is well underway, Bechtel said in the release.
The containers should arrive later this year, and delivery of the spare melter is expected during the summer of 2021, the Energy Department said in a statement this week.
Based in Ogden, Utah, with additional facilities in Idaho, Petersen designs and fabricates equipment for industries including nuclear, aerospace, mining, and petrochemicals. Its Energy Department client list includes Hanford, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico, according to its website.
During fiscal 2019, Bechtel National awarded $145 million in subcontracts to small and large entities including small disadvantaged businesses, women-owned, or veteran-owned firms, the company said in the press release.
