‘Historic’ transfer of radioactive waste to massive Eastern WA treatment plant

Radioactive waste held in underground tanks has begun to be transferred for the first time to the massive Hanford nuclear site vitrification plant for long-awaited treatment for disposal.

“This is a historic moment for everyone who has worked to make this a reality,” said the Washington state Department of Ecology, a Hanford regulator, in a statement Wednesday afternoon.

“We are now on the brink of achieving hot commissioning at the plant – a legal milestone indicating the facility is fully operational and work has begun to treat tens of millions of gallons of nuclear waste,” Ecology said.

An alert to Hanford workers went out about 11:30 a.m. Wednesday saying the transfer had commenced after more than two decades of construction on the Waste Treatment Plant, or vitrification plant, in Eastern Washington.

Some 12,622 gallons of waste were transferred to the vitrification plant, plant workers were told in a message Wednesday evening from Chris Musick, general manager for the Waste Treatment Completion Co., a subcontractor to the vitrification plant contractor Bechtel National.

He called it a turning point in the work to vitrify Hanford’s nuclear waste and protect the Tri-Cities community and the Columbia River.

“We made history today!” said the president of Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure, or H2C, in a message to staff.

It is the first step toward turning tank waste into glass for disposal, said Carol Johnson in her message to H2C workers, who are piping the radioactive waste to the plant.

DOE released a statement saying that “with radioactive tank waste now being transferred to Hanford’s Waste Treatment Plant, the Low Activity Waste Facility hot commissioning process is officially underway.”

“As with every project, Hanford continues working in a safe and deliberate manner as start-up activities progress to meet the Oct. 15, 2025, milestone,” it said.

The waste will soon be fed into a melter at the plant’s Low Activity Waste Facility to be transformed into a stable glass form, the Department of Ecology said.

Not only will that allow waste, some of it 80 years old and held in leak-prone underground tanks, to be disposed of, but it also will allow work to continue to transfer waste from the site’s oldest underground tanks to newer, double-shell tanks, Johnson told employees.

The tanks sit above groundwater that moves underground toward the nearby Columbia River. 56M gallons of radioactive waste

The Department of Energy is ordered by a federal court consent decree to show it can turn radioactive and hazardous chemical waste now stored in underground tanks into a stable glass form at the vitrification plant by Wednesday Oct. 15.

The glassified waste must meet quality standards to be permanently disposed of in a new lined landfill in the center of Hanford without releasing radioactive waste into the environment as radioactivity decays over hundreds of years.

Under the DOE contract to build and commission the plant, Bechtel National is required to fill 10 stainless steel containers with glassified waste by Oct. 15. Each canister is four feet in diameter and 7 feet tall and will weigh more than seven tons when filled.

The Hanford nuclear site adjacent to Richland, Wash., was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce almost two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.

Uranium fuel was irradiated in Hanford reactors and then chemical processing separated out the plutonium, leaving behind 56 million gallons of radioactive and hazardous chemical waste stored in underground tanks, many of them prone to leaking.

Waste is being emptied from 149 leak-prone single-shell tanks, some of them built during WWII, into 27 newer double-shell tanks. However, the double-shell tanks are running out of space until the waste they now hold is treated for disposal.

Waste that has been pretreated to meet standards for vitrification at the vit plant’s Low Activity Waste Facility is staged in a double-shell tank and then piped to the plant.

There the waste will be mixed with silica and other glass-making ingredients.

The waste mixture will be heated in a melter to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit and then poured into stainless steel containers to cool and solidify. Decades of vitrification plans

DOE has long planned to vitrify, or immobilize, the waste in glass.

Its earliest plan for a vitrification plant called for construction to start in 1989 and the plant to begin operating in 1999, according to a Washington state Department of Ecology document.

Work began on what is now the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant only after three earlier plans for a vitrification plant were terminated.

Full-scale construction started on the vitrification plant in the center of the 580-square-mile Hanford site in 2002 after significant earth work had already been done in 2001. The goal then was to produce the first glassified waste in 2007.

Construction has taken longer than expected after multiple issues, including battles over funding and a pause on building for nearly two years to review whether the plant could withstand an earthquake.

DOE also slowed down the plant’s fast-track “design-build” strategy to allow more time between design of individual components and construction after building began on the plant before most of the engineering had been done.

In addition, a plan to start treating both high level radioactive waste and the least radioactive waste at the same time was scrapped after technical issues related to safely treating the most radioactive waste.

Initially, the Low Activity Waste Facility will be operated to glassify the least radioactive waste. Work continues to build the plant’s High Level Waste Facility, which will be used to treat high level radioactive waste. That treatment is required under the federal court consent degree order to begin by 2033.

In addition, a more efficient and less costly way to separate out low activity waste from high level waste has been developed since plant construction began in 2002.

It bypasses the largest building at the vitrification plant, the Pretreatment Facility. The facility initially was planned to separate tank waste into low activity and high level waste for separate treatment.

Now the partially built structure, which may never be used, stands 119 feet high and is wider than a football field and about 1.5 times as long.

Under the current method to prepare waste for vitrification, a modular system, the Tank Side Cesium Removal System, filters out highly radioactive particles from mostly liquid waste and uses an ion exchange system to remove cesium, a high level radioactive waste, that is dissolved in the liquid.

About 90% of the Hanford tank waste is expected to be low activity waste.