Cleaning up Hanford’s ‘greatest risk’ and other radioactive waste could be shelved for 10 years

The Department of Energy appears to be backpedaling on moving highly radioactive capsules to safer storage at Hanford anytime soon.

It released a report Monday detailing its highest priorities on environmental cleanup across its nationwide complex in the coming decade.

At Hanford the focus will be on starting to treat waste at the $17 billion vitrification plant, under construction since 2002.

But the report gives short shrift to most other work at the 580-square-mile nuclear reservation, including moving radioactive capsules at risk in a severe earthquake and cleaning up a highly radioactive spill under the 324 Building a mile north of Richland.

The report may also signal a decreased commitment to cleanup of contaminated groundwater flowing toward the Columbia River.

“It is shocking that DOE would propose to delay projects like the cesium-strontium capsules and the 324 Building contamination, which pose such great risks to the workers and public,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director for Hanford Challenge, a Hanford watchdog and worker advocacy group in Seattle.

The Trump administration’s budget proposal for Hanford for the next fiscal year proposes dramatic cuts to most cleanup work at Hanford other than managing the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste held in underground tanks at Hanford and starting to treat it for disposal.

But the report “Environmental Management Vision 2020-2030: A Time of Transition and Transformation” seems to indicate it is more than a proposed year of delays.

David Reeploeg, the Tri-City Development Council vice president for federal programs, said TRIDEC is pleased that the vision document commits to treating tank waste.

Can’t wait until the 2030s

But the report does not recognize the lessons learned from the partial collapse in May 2017 of a PUREX plant waste storage tunnel storing rail cars loaded with obsolete equipment contaminated with highly radioactive waste, he said.

“Incidents like that one should serve as a reminder of real hazards which exist at Hanford, including at WESF (the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility) and underneath the 324 Building,” Reeploeg said. “Proactively addressing these hazards before they pose an imminent risk is critically important, and frankly, they can’t wait until sometime in the 2030s.”

The new report released Monday says that DOE “will continue to evaluate” the transfer of cesium and strontium to dry storage from their current underwater storage at the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility, but does not commit to do the work in the next decade.

Preparations have been underway for several years to move the capsules, after concerns were raised about the structural integrity of the pool holding 1,936 capsules of strontium and cesium, each 22 inches long, in central Hanford.

Most recently, a $5.6 million contract was awarded to Intermech of Richland in October to build the dry storage area for the capsules near their current storage pool in WESF.

The Oregon Department of Energy raised concerns in 2013 that the concrete walls of the pool have lost structural integrity due to high radiation exposure over four decades.

The next year the DOE Office of Inspector General found that the pool, built in 1973, could be at risk in a severe earthquake.

Limited groundwater cleanup?

DOE has since said it considers the pool the greatest risk in the nationwide DOE complex for serious accident.

If cooling is lost and the capsules overheat and break, radiation could make the building too hazardous for workers to enter, according to a 2000 report by former contractor Fluor Hanford.

A loss of cooling water also presents a risk of releasing radioactive contamination into the ground or air.

The 324 Building spill is not only near Richland but also near the Columbia River.

Extensive work already has been done on the project to prepare to stabilize the building and then cut through the floor to dig up the soil using an excavator arm mounted in a hot cell of the building.

Work had been planned to be done remotely by operating the excavator arm from outside the cell and looking through a leaded window.

DOE officials have said that the radioactive cesium and strontium contamination beneath the building is so radioactive that it would be fatal within a few minutes of human contact.

But the new DOE report said that “over the coming decade, the 324 Building will be placed in a minimum surveillance and maintenance configuration until remediation can be resumed.”

The report also said that groundwater will be cleaned up along the Columbia River at the rate of about 1 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater cleaned a year.

However, it did not mention operating the largest and most sophisticated groundwater treatment plant in the DOE complex, the 200 West Pump and Treat Facility in central Hanford, which removes several chemical and radioactive contaminants.

The plant has the capacity to treat 2,500 gallons a minute and DOE Hanford officials and their contractor have planned to increase its treatment capacity to 3,750 gallons a minute, they said in December.

In fiscal year 2019, Hanford plants along the river and the central Hanford plant treated more than 2.4 billion gallons of contaminated groundwater.

Cuts ‘inexplicable’

Work that would be done in the next decade other than on tank waste at Hanford includes filling some trenches and a settling tank that are highly contaminated with plutonium with concrete-like grout to prevent a possible collapse. That work is expected to start in a few months.

Work also would be done over the next decade, not to clean up, but to stabilize two huge processing plants that operated during the Cold War — REDOX and PUREX.

Hanford produced plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program during the Cold War and World War II. Processing plants chemically separated plutonium from uranium fuel irradiated in nine Hanford reactors.

The main focus at Hanford over the next decade would be meeting a federal court-enforced deadline of 2023 to start turning some of the least radioactive tank waste into a stable glass form at the vitrification plant and continuing treatment, according to the new report.

Work also would continue to retrieve waste from leak-prone single shell tanks and transfer it for storage in newer double-shell tanks until it can be treated for disposal.

The Government Accountability Office released a report less than a month ago finding fault with a DOE program to prevent more failures of aging facilities at Hanford.

“In light of the highly critical GAO report that took DOE to the woodshed for failing to pay attention to high-risk failures with potentially huge safety consequences, it is inexplicable that DOE would cut the budget for these very same activities in response,” Carpenter said. “We need new leadership.”

This story was originally published March 10, 2020 at 10:03 AM.