A facility to remove cesium from low-level radioactive tank waste has already treated 200,000 gallons of waste at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state, an agency spokesperson said this week.
The Tank Side Cesium Removal (TSCR) project at Hanford was offline briefly during February, staff at the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said in a recent weekly report. “A minor difference in the signal output from the gamma monitors caused a one-day pause in operations before being corrected,” the DOE spokesperson said in a Thursday email.
Since being placed into operation Jan. 26, roughly 200,000 gallons of waste have been treated with TSCR and the facility’s two ion exchange columns have reached their saturation level of cesium, the agency spokesperson said. The system is in a drying out phase prior to the planned replacement of the columns.
“We are scheduled to begin moving the two ion exchange columns to a nearby storage pad next week” with treatment on the second batch of waste anticipated early next month, the spokesperson said.
DOE and tank management contractor Washington River Protection Solutions hope to have 1 million gallons pretreated by TSCR by the end of this year. The goal is to have a supply of such waste ready to be vitrified into a glass form when the Waste Treatment Plant is due to start processing direct-feed low-activity waste by the end of 2023.
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D) signed into law on March 11 a bill intended to clarify eligibility for the presumption for workers’ compensation for everyone “working at a radiological hazardous waste facility.”
The new state law has implications for a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.
In January, the high, an independent branch of the federal government, agreed to hear the Department of Justice challenge to a 2018 Washington law designed to make it easier for workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site to win compensation for certain occupational illnesses after working at the highly-contaminated federal property.
Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed written arguments with the high court seeking to preserve the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision to uphold the law.
“Our understanding of the new law is that it would very likely make the current challenge” a non-issue, and increase the likelihood the Supreme Court would toss the case, said Nikolas Peterson, the deputy and legal director at the Hanford Challenge citizen group said in a Thursday email.
The Department of Energy received 10 shipments of defense-related transuranic waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico during February.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) public website showed 10 shipments for the month taking place between Feb. 7 and Feb. 24.
Five were received from the Idaho National Laboratory and five from the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. As of Monday, WIPP had reported a total of 18 shipments emplaced during the first two months of calendar year 2022. That is down a bit from the 23 recorded during the first two months of 2021.
For the first five months of fiscal 2022, which started Oct. 1, 2021, WIPP had received 79 shipments. Management at WIPP has said it hopes to hasten the pace of shipments by the middle of this calendar year, when it starts disposing of waste in Panel 8 and leaves Panel 7 which was contaminated by an underground radiation leak during February 2014.
