Brian Vance, the top manager for the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, told a National Academies panel Tuesday “time is our common enemy” in cleaning up the most contaminated property in the weapons complex.
“Maximizing risk reduction per dollar,” is key to addressing the 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste stored in underground tanks at the former plutonium production complex, Vance told the expert panel assembled by National Academies of Sciences’ Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board.
The group is meeting this week in Richland, Wash.
“There are proven and available technologies that can be leveraged to support the acceleration of cleanup,” Vance told the panel as it kicked off three days of information gathering, which included a Hanford Site visit Tuesday.
“In the end we all want the same thing, a safer and cleaner Hanford Site,” Vance said.
Between now and June 12 the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board panel is taking comment on an ongoing federal study on supplemental treatments such as grout for low-activity waste that won’t be run through the Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel.
The Waste Treatment Plant should start turning low-level tank waste into a more stable glass form by the end of 2023, according to DOE. But the new plant might only handle half of the low-level waste which accounts for most of the volume, but far fewer radionuclides, than the high-level waste that will start vitrification in the 2030s.
As directed by the National Defense Authorization Act of 2021, the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board panel will then file its information with the Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina, which is leading the research into the supplemental waste technologies. The nuclear board should file its recommendations to the Savannah River National Laboratory in August, said John Applegate, professor of law at Indiana University who chairs the panel of experts assembled by the National Academies’ board.
The final report with recommendations on supplemental waste at Hanford should be out in early 2023.
