Discussing priorities looking towards 2026, he said
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in the last few years site management had focused on three types of risk reduction: the tank waste; the central plateau and river; and infrastructure to support work across the site.
The overall objectives were:
● Safe and secure operations ● Manage, treat and dispose of tank waste ● Stabilise ageing structures ● Demolish of retired facilities ● Remediate waste sites ● Treat contaminated groundwater
He said around 2.2 billion gallons (8.3 million m3 ) a year of
groundwater was being treated each year. In a major step for the site clean-up, the waste is about
to begin the process of being transferred from the double- shell tanks to the Waste Treatment Plant for vitrification.
Vitrification campaign set to begin Stabilising and immobilising waste using vitrification is the headline programme for the next few years, with work due to begin in 2025. As originally envisioned, the Hanford waste treatment plant (WTP) would have treated high-level and low-activity radioactive waste simultaneously. Instead, the DOE decided to begin treating low-activity waste as soon as practicable, and it expects to begin treating high-level waste about a decade later. The programme is called direct-feed low-activity waste (DFLAW). It sends pre-treated low-activity waste from the Tank Farms, directly to the Low-Activity Waste (LAW) facility at the WTP. The distance between the tank farms and the waste treatment plant is approximately 22.5 miles (36 km).
At the LAW facility the waste will be vitrified – mixed with
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glass-forming materials and then fed into two 300 tonne melters and heated to 2,100 oF (1150 oC). The melters are approximately 20 feet by 30 feet and 16 feet high (7x10x5 m). The glass mixture will then be poured into stainless steel containers, each of which holds 6.6 tonnes of waste. The Waste Treatment Plant has now been constructed and in 2023 it underwent cold commissioning. The melters were commissioned in December 2023, when the first clean (ie non-radioactive) molten glass was poured into the first container. Jones explained that on any given day the programme
will have 25 operations under way to address the 53 million gallons (200,000 m3
) of waste in the double-walled tanks
and bring it to the vitrification process. Waste is sent to underground tank AP107, where it is sampled for testing in the onsite laboratory. It undergoes caesium removal, by passing through an ion exchange column, which treats 5 gallons per minute or 7200 gallons per day (27 m3
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campaign using that process found that 99.9% of caesium was removed. Following this process the waste is decanted to tank
AP106 and sampled. From there it is transferred in batches to the low activity waste treatment plant. The WTP will accept up to 8,000 gallons (30 m3
) per day when it is finally
operable. The WTP has two melters which operate in parallel. Several WTP infrastructure facilities have been modified
to support the LAW Facility and Effluent Management Facility (EMF), which will process liquid secondary effluent.
18 | May 2024 |
www.neimagazine.com
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