The Washington state Department of Ecology has issued an operations permit for the analytical laboratory for the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site.
This permit, issued in the spring, is the state agency’s first operations approval for the plant being built by Bechtel to turn Hanford’s radioactive tank waste into a solidified glass form, Ecology spokeswoman Joanna Morse said by email on July 5. The approval for the analytical lab to begin actual operations was incorporated into Hanford’s site-wide dangerous waste permit with the state, she added.
The lab will analyze waste from Hanford’s underground storage tanks to ensure that the correct glass-forming recipe is used at the plant, Morse said. It will also sample waste after the vitrification process to ensure it meets quality standards.
The Bechtel-built laboratory is in startup and will begin officially operating when the plant starts processing low-activity waste. That is required by 2023 under a federal court order, though Bechtel hopes to start it up by 2022. The laboratory is the first facility within the vitrification facility to go through all phases of the state’s permit process, from design to construction to operations.
Bechtel has described the lab as being about the size of a football field and 45 feet high. It took about 12,000 cubic yards of concrete and 635,000 hours to build, according to the company. The laboratory is on the WTP site, next to the low-activity waste vitrification facility.
The operating permit expires after 10 years and must be renewed. The lab is expected to analyze about 3,000 samples each year and report results once the WTP is operational.
State approval is “another key step” toward startup of the direct-feed low-activity waste process at WTP as soon as possible, said Jason Young, the laboratory’s federal project director at the DOE Office of Environmental Management’s Office of River Protection at Hanford. “We appreciate Ecology’s timely review and approval of the permit as we get closer to WTP facility startup and commissioning.”
The Office of River Protection oversees the Hanford Site’s 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste, left by decades of nuclear weapons-related plutonium production.
The Energy Department and Bechtel held a 60-day public comment period for the lab’s operating permit, which included a public meeting. The Department of Ecology also conducted its own 45-day public comment period before granting permit approval.
About 45 staff members, including chemists, technicians, and specialists, will be hired and trained in the next few years. The new staff will support the lab’s “hot commissioning” phase, according to Bechtel spokesman George Rangel.
“Due to the unprecedented scale and complexity of vitrifying Hanford’s radioactive tank waste, the Analytical Laboratory operating permit was requested well in advance before WTP comes online,” Rangel said.
The Effluent Management Facility and the Low-Activity Waste Facility will likely be the next major components of the WTP to go through the operating license phase, with completion targeted for summer 2020.
