The Department of Energy’s plans to kick off a public comment period next month on options for removing seven aging structures within the 200 West Area of the Hanford Site in Washington state.
In a Monday announcement, DOE said these are “Tier 2” structures, meaning the facilities are chemically or radiologically contaminated due to Hanford’s past plutonium mission and require a Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act response due to the potential for hazardous releases.
All the structures were built between the 1940s and the 1980s and are contaminated to various degrees, DOE said, adding that removal would both reduce environmental risks and lower overall Hanford surveillance and maintenance costs.
The DOE will hold a 30-day public comment period on an engineering evaluation and cost analysis for three alternatives for what the agency describes as “non-time-critical” demolition.
The 231-Z Materials Engineering Laboratory, located within the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) complex, would be the first targeted for decontamination and demolition to allow crews to continue key risk-reduction work on the Central Plateau, DOE said. The 231-Z Materials building is a 1940s vintage facility, once known as the Isolation Building, and was used for the final step for processing plutonium.
The outgoing cleanup contractor on Hanford’s central plateau, the Jacobs-owned CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Company, finished tearing down PFP’s main processing facility in 2020.
Others structures in the group are the 213-W Waste Compactor Building, the 242-S Evaporator Facility, 242-T Waste Disposal Evaporator Building, the 242-TB Vent House, the 292-S Jet Pit House and the 292-T Fission Products Release Laboratory.
The agency expects to issue a fact sheet and other information closer to the start of the public comment period in March. In the meantime, questions can be emailed to Jennifer Colborn at [email protected].
The Washington state Department of Ecology kicked off a 45-day comment period this week on proposed changes to its permit for the Waste Treatment Plant being built by Bechtel at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site.
The state is inviting public comment until March 17 on the closure plan for the $17-billion facility designed to convert radioactive tank waste leftover from decades of plutonium production into a glass form for eventual disposal. Bechtel and DOE are scheduled to start feeding low-activity waste into the plant by the end of 2023.
The closure plan lays out the steps needed to close the Dangerous Waste Management Units at the vitrification plant. This includes removing hazardous and mixed waste and the decontamination of the permitted units, ancillary equipment and other material, according to the state notice.
The closure plan is included under the Dangerous Waste Portion for the Treatment, Storage, and Disposal section of the state permit, according to Ecology. A link to the comment page is available here.
A public hearing is not currently scheduled, but to request one contact Daina McFadden, Ecology’s permit communication specialist, by emailing [email protected].
Before leaving office with the rest of the Donald Trump administration, then-Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette asked a federal nuclear safety board for a 60-day extension to produce a report on concerns about transuranic waste handling at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
In the letter dated Jan. 19, and posted last week on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB) website, Brouillette asked DOE be given until March 19 to respond to a board technical report on “Potential Energetic Chemical Reactions Events Involving Transuranic Waste at Los Alamos National Laboratory.”
“The extension request is based on the complexity of the issues involved, and the desire to ensure that an integrated, complete and accurate response is provided,” Brouillette wrote.
In a Sept. 24 letter to DOE, Thomas Summers DNFSB’s acting chairman at the time, said the board believes safety oversight at Los Alamos by both the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management and the semiautonomous National Nuclear Security Administration don’t fully account for the possibility of chemical reactions in drums of transuranic waste.
The DNFSB letter urged DOE to look at transuranic waste storage, handling and processing across Los Alamos facilities to be studied in order to catch potential problem drums before they’re shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, N.M.
In February 2014, an improperly packaged drum of waste from Los Alamos burst open underground in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, shutting down waste emplacement at the facility for nearly three years. In April 2018, several waste drums overheated and blew off their lids at the Idaho National Laboratory. Both incidents illustrate the need for “multiple layers of protection,” according to the DNFSB letter.
