West Valley Heavy Equipment Headed for Concrete Tomb in October

Heavy equipment left over from a successful liquid-waste disposal operation at the West Valley Demonstration Project should be entombed in concrete in Texas by October, a DOE contractor said Wednesday at the 2016 Waste Management Conference.

Some 600,000 gallons of high-level liquid waste leftover from West Valley, the only U.S. site ever to reprocess spent fuel from commercial nuclear reactors, was turned into radioactive glass via the vitrification process between 1996 and 2002.

The glass has since been stored on site — and could remain there for decades yet — but the massive melter cauldron where the waste was mixed with molten glass, and a pair of tanks that fed the melter, are packaged and “ready to go” off-site, Scott Anderson, vice president of CH2M Hill BWXT West Valley, said in a panel discussion.

The heavy equipment, nearly 400 tons worth, will be shipped by truck and rail to Waste Control Specialists’ Federal Waste Facility near Andrews, Texas, in September, and prepared for disposal in concrete blocks in October, Anderson said during the Wednesday morning session, “Problematic U.S. DOE Mixed Waste Streams and Policy Changes.”