Plants To Treat Waste Get Go-Ahead Energy Department Approves Demonstration Plan At Hanford

The U.S. Energy Department said Friday it has endorsed the final environmental impact statement for a plan to clean up the tons of radioactive waste in underground tanks at the Hanford nuclear reservation.

The DOE said it has signed a “record of decision” to have two private companies build demonstration plants to treat the 56 million gallons of highly radioactive and chemically toxic defense wastes.

“This decision is a major step forward in the cleanup of Hanford’s tank farms and fulfillment of DOE’s commitment to the taxpayers and people of the Northwest to a better, faster, safer and cheaper cleanup program that protects the health and environment of the Northwest,” said Hanford manager John Wagoner.

The 177 buried tanks, some of which are leaking, contain 240,000 metric tons of radioactive wastes from plutonium processing. The contents of some of the tanks are not known. Several tanks have been subject to heat buildup, requiring complicated venting of flammable gases.

By privatizing, the DOE says it will save 25 percent to 30 percent of the estimated $40 billion it would cost the government to build and operate its own vitrification plants.

The Energy Department awarded contracts in September to two teams - one led by BNFL Inc., the other by Lockheed Martin Advanced Environmental Systems - to develop technology to treat the waste stored in the tanks.

In the first phase of the plan, the teams will build and operate two plants to separate low-level radioactive waste and treat it, and a third plant to imbed high-level radioactive waste in a more stable, glasslike substance.

The contracts require the plants to treat between 6 percent and 13 percent of the waste over a 10-year period as demonstration projects. The record of decision, however, also allows them to treat as much as 30 percent of the waste.

In the plan’s second phase, the companies will build larger plants and tackle the rest of the waste.

The contractors are to be paid based on the amount of treated waste they produce, rather than on the cost-plus-profit basis that traditionally has been used.

Under the DOE’s plan, the first wastes would be removed from tanks by late 2001 and the project completed by 2028.

Hanford produced weapons-grade plutonium beginning with the Manhattan Project of World War II and continuing until the late 1980s. Cleanup is expected to take decades and cost tens of billions of dollars.

The 560-square-mile reservation on the banks of the Columbia River is considered the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site and contains more than half the nation’s nuclear weapons wastes.