HANFORD TANKS | COVER STORY
Clean-up prompts further research
The US Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (EM), which has overall responsibility for the site, awarded US$27.3 million for research and development to accelerate the tank waste clean-up mission. The funds go to 13 two- to three-year projects led by six national laboratories. Projects were selected that are aimed at developing “breakthrough technologies” to drastically
reduce the life-cycle cost and schedule of the Hanford tank waste clean-up mission. The selected projects address challenges in: waste retrieval, transport and closure; waste
pre-treatment; waste immobilisation and disposal; and mission enabling. Savannah River National Laboratory has four projects: integrity monitoring and assessment,
prediction, repair and corrosion control; efficient electrochemical denitration and caustic generation system for direct-feed waste pre-treatment; direct stabilisation of low-activity waste with advanced engineered cellular magmatics; and technoeconomic optimisation of Hanford Tank Waste: a data driven approach to inventory, logistics and disposition Pacific Northwest National Laboratory won finding for four projects: Enabling High-Level Waste Sludge Delivery Through In-tank Processing in the Southeast Quadrant of the Hanford Tank Farms; Expand High-Level Waste Glass Processing Envelope; Developing a Hanford Grout Modelling Framework and Property Database for Performance Assessments; And Real-time Liquid/Slurry Waste Sampling & Analysis. Los Alamos National Laboratory won funding for two projects: Dry Retrieval of Tank Waste; and Real-Time In-Line Monitoring for Hanford Tank Waste Treatment. Argonne, Idaho and Sandia National Laboratories each won funding for one project, respectively:
the Surface Chemistry of Plutonium Oxide for Waste Pre-treatment; Digitally Optimized Autonomous Guided Vehicles for Hanford Waste Tank Handling; and Improved Fundamental Understanding of Aluminum Chemistry and Interactions of Aluminate Anion with Co-Anions. ■
based on available technology. Tanks are considered clean when no more than 360 cubic feet (10 m3
) of waste remains
— or less, depending on tank size. The tank farm waste will be treated at a new Waste Treatment and Immobilisation Plant where the waste will be vitrified and stored in steel canisters for long-term disposal. On 6 March representatives of the Hanford site gave an
update to stakeholders. Greg Jones is DoE assistant manager, business and finance and Hanford CFO. He said that the site’s use and
clean up had been ongoing since 1943 but there was still 40-50 years of clean-up to go. The site was managed under a five-year rolling plan. The government-funded operation depends on funds being allocated so he said every year the site was working on three budgets. The current year is fixed – it was already executing FY24 budgets, although that budget would not be finally agreed until legislation was passed, which at the time appeared imminent. In the upcoming years the team had to make assumptions, and it was now formulating plans for FY26.
Above: The Hanford nuclear site is located on the Columbia River
www.neimagazine.com | May 2024 | 17
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