HANFORD — The Department of Energy should consider delaying work toward an addition to treat all of Hanford's radioactive tank waste for up to five years, a federal advisory board subcommittee has recommended.
That's not sitting well with the state of Washington, which less than a year ago agreed to extend the deadline for operating the Hanford vitrification plant from 2011 to 2019, but required concessions including a a timely start to all waste treatment.
The $12.2 billion Waste Treatment Plant, or vitrification plant, was not designed to treat the entire 56 million gallons of Hanford radioactive and chemical waste stored in underground tanks. It is planned to glassify all the high level radioactive waste, but possibly just half of the low activity waste, all of it now stored in underground tanks.
The waste is from processing irradiated fuel to remove plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.
One possibility to treat the remainder of the low activity waste for permanent disposal is building a second low activity waste facility to the one already being built at the vitrification plant. DOE also is investigating other technologies to treat the remaining waste, including steam reforming, which would process the waste using high pressure steam and produce a ceramic waste form.
"DOE should consider delaying the selection and procurement of supplemental LAW (low activity waste) treatment facilities by three to five years to enable focus on startup of WTP (Waste Treatment Plant) operations and level funding needs," according to a new report by the Environmental Management Advisory Board's Tank Waste Subcommittee.
DOE headquarters is reviewing that and other recommendations in the report, said DOE Hanford spokesman Erik Olds.
The state of Washington favors vitrification for treatment of all the tank waste, which could be accomplished by building the second low activity waste facility at the vit plant. If DOE wants to do something else, it is required to submit a report by fall 2014 comparing the technology and type of waste form to what a second low activity waste facility would produce. A decision then would be made in 2015, following DOE and state negotiations.
Whichever method is picked in cooperation with the state, DOE needs to have the supplemental waste treatment facility operating in 2022 under newly negotiated deadlines.
"Our concern is if you delay making a decision in 2015 by three years, that is not enough time to build, permit and commission a facility by 2022," said Suzanne Dahl, Washington State Department of Ecology waste treatment section manager.
Having all low activity waste treatment facilities operating by 2022 is key to getting all the waste treated by 2047, she said. If low activity waste is not being processed fast enough, that could cause a log jam in the pretreatment process that separates waste into low activity and high level waste streams, which would delay treatment of the high level radioactive waste.
Delaying the deadline for operating the vitrification plant until 2019 was "a hard pill to swallow," Dahl said. But knowing that all the needed facilities to treat waste would be operating by 2022, made it easier to accept, she said. Negotiations for new legally binding Tri-Party Agreement deadlines and a consent decree concluded in October.
The advisory board subcommittee said that delaying a decision about supplemental low activity waste treatment would require agreement by all parties under the consent decree. But the delay could allow lessons learned to be used, including from the commissioning of the vitrification plant and from steam reforming at the Integrated Waste Treatment Facility at Idaho, it said.
The delay could allow the vit plant's Low Activity Waste Facility that's under construction to begin operating, providing better information on how large a supplemental waste treatment facility will need to be, the subcommittee said.
A delay also could ease a money crunch for the vitrification plant from 2016 to 2020 and allow the financial focus to be on the start of operations for the vitrification plant, it said.
The subcommittee also supported work toward DOE's proposed "Vision 2020," which calls for a phased start of operation of the vitrification plant. In late 2016, the Low Activity Waste Facility would begin operating, but not the High Level Waste Facility.
The early startup of low activity waste treatment would cost more, but the experience gained could reduce risks that could cause delays in startup of the vitrification plant.
