The Washington Pollution Control Hearings Board was set Friday to hold a hearing about an environmental group’s appeal of an agreement between the state and the Department of Energy about emptying two leaky radioactive waste tanks at the Hanford Site.
Seattle-based Heart of America Northwest filed the appeal on Sept. 26 against the Washington Department of Ecology, which in late August signed an agreement with DOE governing the emptying of a pair of leaky single-shell waste tanks: B-109 and T-111.
The state DOE agreed to speed up retrieval of the wastes from the two tanks but did not set any deadlines. Heart of America Northwest says the agreement will delay action on the leaky tanks for years.
T-111 has been leaking since 2013. B109 was first studied for suspected leaks in July 2020.
During a Wednesday public meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board in Kennewick, Wash., Delmar Noyes, DOE’s Hanford assistant manager for tank operations, declined to discuss details of the environmental group’s appeal.
DOE and Ecology have agreed to develop a plan to respond more quickly to future tank leaks, but they set no deadline for this task. The parties said it took from April 2021 to August 2022 just to nail down a plan for B-109.
The state and the feds have meanwhile agreed to put waterproof barriers across the entire B and T tank farms by 2028 to prevent rainwater from seeping into the tanks.
Tank B-109 currently holds 123,000 gallons of solid or sludgy wastes of which 13,000 gallons are fluids tucked away in the solids’ nooks and crannies. Tank T-111 holds 397,000 gallons of solids with 37,000 gallons of fluids intermingled with that material.
In total, Hanford’s 177 underground tanks hold roughly 56 million gallons of liquid, sludges and solid wastes. At one point, the agency suspected at least 68 tanks of leaking. However, Hanford has reclassified 10 of those tanks as sound, meaning, in some cases, that site personnel assessed that any waste spillage near them was not caused by a breach in the tank itself.
That left a total of 58 tanks classified as “assumed leakers,” according to the site’s Waste Tank Summary Report for June 2022, the latest such report available at deadline. As of Friday, only B-109 and T-111 were actively leaking, a Hanford spokesperson said in an email.
Hanford is building the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) to convert a portion of the tank farms’ liquid waste into stable glass-like cylinders. DOE wants to begin solidifying low-level tank waste by 2023 but has until some time in 2024 to start, under a court-approved agreement.
Editor’s note, 3:36 p.m. Eastern time Oct. 21, 2022: the story was changed to include details about Hanford tanks declared by the site to be stable.
