Project Could Quicken Hanford Waste Cleanup Private Firms Would Contain Nuke Waste Inside Glass Logs

The U.S. Energy Department’s plan to pay private companies to turn some radioactive wastes at Hanford into glass logs could shorten the timetable for part of the cleanup, officials said Monday.

If the project is a success, low-level tank waste at the Hanford nuclear reservation will be cleaned up four years ahead of schedule, said Jerry Gilliland, spokesman for the state Department of Ecology.

“If this works, this might be quite a breakthrough. If it doesn’t, we’re hoping it won’t be a big setback,” Gilliland said in a telephone interview from Olympia.

The Energy Department wants to award contracts to two private companies, which would use their own money to build plants where radioactive waste would be melted into glass logs. The DOE would pay for every waste log produced.

The technology involved has never been used in exactly this way before.

The glassified wastes would still be radioactive, but would be much more stable for long-term storage or burial, Gilliland said.

The process “doesn’t destroy the radioactivity at all. It just immobilizes it. … It would still be very dangerous to be near them,” he said.

The tank farm at Hanford poses one of the most dangerous and complex problems facing the Energy Department as it cleans up radioactive waste left over from decades of nuclear weapons production during the Cold War.

This part of the Hanford cleanup is scheduled to be completed by the year 2028. By privatizing, the DOE hopes to save 25 percent to 30 percent of the estimated $40 billion it would cost the government to build and operate its own vitrification plants, officials said.

The 177 buried tanks, some of which are leaking, contain 240,000 metric tons of radioactive wastes from plutonium processing.

Bids are expected to go out this spring for the vitrification venture, which was approved in September by Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary.

DOE spokesman Guy Schein said he is confident private companies will be interested despite the sizable initial investment and long wait for payment.

The DOE and the state Ecology Department plan a public meeting Thursday night at Columbia Basin Community College in Pasco to discuss tentative changes to the Tri-Party Agreement. That pact - between those two agencies and the federal Environmental Protection Agency - established a long-term environmental cleanup plan at Hanford.