Hanford waste treatment plant under way
Construction has started on a test plant that could be turning radioactive waste at Hanford into glass by the end of the year.
“We’re not talking about laboratory or bench scale quantities of low-activity tank waste, but vitrifying up to 300,000 gallons of treated tank waste,” said Roy Schepens, manager of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection.
He spoke at a ceremony Wednesday at Hanford to mark the start of construction at the bulk vitrification pilot plant.
Two years ago, DOE and regulators began discussing whether technology existed that could speed up treatment of some of the 53 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste held in Hanford’s underground tanks.
DOE is building a $5.8 billion vitrification plant, the Waste Treatment Plant, to turn all of Hanford’s high-level radioactive tank waste and some of the low-activity radioactive tank waste into glass logs for permanent disposal.
The waste started accumulating during World War II when Hanford began making plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
But the Waste Treatment Plant never was planned to be able to treat all the waste by a legal deadline of 2028.
Instead DOE and regulators have been looking at alternate technologies, picking bulk vitrification as the primary technology for pilot testing and demonstration out of 22 evaluated.
“The goal was straightforward: Move away from a one-size-fits-all approach for treating 53 million gallons of tank waste by investing in available and proven commercial technologies,” Schepens said.
The bulk vitrification process mixes radioactive waste with Hanford’s silica-rich soil in a steel box up to 24 feet long. Two electrodes are inserted to heat the mixture to 2,400 degrees.
The mixture melts, then cools into a brick of black glass. It looks like volcanic obsidian, but it is more durable, according to DOE contractor CH2M Hill Hanford Group. The box, including the electrodes, can then be permanently buried at Hanford with the waste immobilized in the glass.
Continue ready this story from the Tri-City Herald:
Hanford waste treatment plant under way