The Low Activity Waste Facility at the Hanford Site in Washington State is now scheduled to begin solidifying liquid waste not sooner than 2024, instead of 2023, because of COVID-19, under a recent agreement between the Department of Energy and Washington state.
In December, Judge Rosanna Peterson of the Eastern District of Washington approved a start-up delay of several months after a joint request from the Department of Energy and the Washington Department of Ecology. The Low Activity Waste Facility was previously to start treating waste by Dec. 31, 2023, under the now-modified consent decree governing Hanford cleanup.
Under a formula settled on by the parties, and excluding weekends and federal holidays, the deadline extension was roughly five months and counting, as of Wednesday. Add back the weekends and holidays and it’s roughly eight months.
The parties sought the extension after different Hanford projects went into limited operations in late March during the early days of the pandemic, restricting work at the former plutonium production site to essential maintenance until the summer.
Hanford’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, of which the Low Activity Waste Facility is a part, is designed to eventually solidify 56 million gallons of low-activity and high-level wastes from Hanford’s underground tanks using a process called vitrification — converting the waste into more stable, glass-like cylinders.
When construction began on the waste treatment plant in 2002, DOE was legally obligated to be able to treat both low-activity and high-level wastes by 2011. By 2008, Washington filed a federal lawsuit because the 2011 deadline appeared unreachable. That resulted in a new deadline of 2019 to begin operations.
As it became apparent that the 2019 deadline would be missed, Judge Peterson in 2016 approved a new deadline to begin treating only low-activity wastes by Dec. 31, 2023.
