A National Academies committee studying technology development needed across the Department of Energy environmental management complex should focus on technologies that can provide final and lasting reductions in long-term risk, according to the Oregon Department of Energy.
The fiscal 2017 DOE appropriations bill directed the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study technologies that could “reduce long-term costs” and “accelerate schedules” for cleanup of nuclear sites.
“While we recognize there is considerable work to be done at Hanford and a definite need for the development of new technologies, whether they result in cost or schedule savings is less urgent a question than whether the protect people and the environment,” said Ken Niles, the state agency’s director of nuclear safety, in comments submitted to the committee.
The Hanford Site in Washington state has had some successful technology development, including sluicers and the robotic Mobile Arm Retrieval System to retrieve waste from underground tanks that hold 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, Niles said. Development of the technologies took at least a and cost tens of millions of dollars, but should make the next tank retrieval technologies cheaper and faster, he said.
Oregon also is encouraged by DOE’s research into advanced glass formulas to allow more waste to be loaded into each canister of glass that will be produced at Hanford’s Waste Treatment Plant. “Success in this arena could potentially save DOE billions of dollars,” Niles said. It could shorten the operating time of the plant and reduce disposal costs.
But there also have been some notable failures in technology development at Hanford, including some that “dragged on and sucked money away from cleanup,” he said. “Examples here include bulk vitrification, which was investigated for nearly a decade at a cost of tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, and the consideration of grout for much of Hanford’s tank waste, which was seemingly abandoned more than two decades ago, but once again has been revived.”
At times DOE has been reluctant to use technology if it is new to Hanford, Niles said. Oregon advocated as early as 1986 for drilling wells on the diagonal beneath Hanford’s tank farms – slant well drilling – to learn more about waste that has leaked from the tanks. But the technology was not used at Hanford until 2000, when extensive information was collected about contaminants beneath the SX Tank Farm.
More new technologies are needed at Hanford, he said. Among pressing needs are ways to clean up radioactive and chemical waste deep underground, both from tank leaks and the discharge of contaminated liquids into the soil.
With tank waste treatment expected to continue into the 2060s or beyond, better ways to assess the integrity and enhance the outer shells of Hanford’s double-shell tanks are needed, Niles said.
Oregon supports removing contaminants and waste from the ground if possible, but where waste must be left and covered with a cap, more durable caps must be developed, he said. “Most waste site caps have a life expectancy measured in decades. Hanford’s wastes will clearly pose a risk far longer than that,” he said.
“The pursuit of the ‘new shiny thing’ does carry some risks,” Niles said. Funding must not be diverted from cleanup to develop new technology and environmental remediation must not be delayed to investigate new approaches, he said. The Energy Department has not been consistently willing to invest adequate funds toward technology development, but the National Academies assessment could spur new interest and funding for new technologies, he said.
The National Academies committee visited Hanford, which is upriver from Oregon, from April 23-25, after earlier visiting the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The committee’s schedule calls for a visit to the Idaho National Laboratory on May 16-17. On Aug. 8-10, half of the committee will visit the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and half will visit the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
The committee plans to release a report in January 2015. It is expected to include an assessment of processes for selecting technologies for development and an assessment of technologies or alternative cleanup approaches that could reduce costs, speed up cleanup, address risks, or otherwise significantly improve remediation operations.
