Questions for DOE and WA state about Hanford tank waste cleanup | Guest Opinion

More than $14 billion has been spent by DOE on the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP), with no estimate of final cost or completion date.

The original DOE/Bechtel contract to build the WTP to treat, immobilize, and dispose of the nuclear waste stored in Hanford’s 177 underground tanks was signed in 2000 for $3.96 billion with completion scheduled for 2011.

Currently the WTP scope has been reduced significantly, yet costs continue to rise. Two of the five planned facilities were put on hold in 2012 due to technical problems. DOE’s latest strategy, Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste (DFLAW) process, does not include plans to complete the entire scope of tank waste cleanup.

DOE has not put forth a credible, workable, or affordable plan that completes Hanford tank cleanup before the next century.

DFLAW will treat only 40 percent of the low-level tank waste over the next 30 years, while creating as much secondary liquid waste as it treats. This secondary waste will contain technetium and iodine, which Ecology will not permit to be disposed of on the Hanford Site.

Congress allocated $10 million to conduct a commercial-scale demonstration to retrieve, treat, and immobilize low-level waste from the tanks using grout with final out-of-state disposal. Ninety percent of all the waste in the tanks could be treated using grout with no secondary waste stream. DOE’s Office of River Protection has not moved this demonstration forward.

Grout is much faster and five times less expensive than vitrification, and the grouted waste would be disposed of out of the state of Washington.

President Biden’s new executive order for government agencies to reduce carbon emissions also must be addressed at Hanford. In full operation, the WTP will burn 45,000 gallons of diesel a day to produce steam for the DFLAW process and other WTP operations, emitting 500 tons of carbon dioxide per day.

The public needs answers to some serious questions:

1. What is the true current estimated cost and schedule for cleanup completion of tank waste at Hanford? And what are the major assumptions of this estimate?

2. Why have DOE and the Department of Ecology delayed the Test Bed Initiative Phase 2 demonstration for three years when it could save taxpayers $billions and accelerate cleanup by decades?

3. Why has local representation been denied to the Tri-Cities and eastern Washington on matters that directly affect this region?

4. Why has the Department of Ecology delayed for nearly 12 years issuing the RCRA dangerous waste permit that DOE needs to clean up the Hanford Tank Farms?

5. Why have DOE and the Department of Ecology ignored the recommendations of the GAO, the National Academy of Sciences, and three national laboratories that grout treatment for low-level or mixed-low-level waste is a recommended alternative that is five times less costly than vitrification?

6. Why do DOE and the Department of Ecology continue to focus exclusively on vitrification when the WTP’s steam plant alone will dump 500 tons of carbon per day into the atmosphere?

The reason for community concern is that the required levels of Congressional funding to support DOE’s current plans to vitrify Hanford’s tank waste are not sustainable. Years of delay and advancement of technology and new processes have rendered Hanford’s current plan obsolete.

The communities in the region most affected by this plan have voiced their support for accelerated cleanup by alternative and supplemental means.

We call on DOE and Ecology to quit stalling and move forward with commercial alternatives to stabilization and out-of-state disposal of low-level waste from Hanford tanks.

This story was originally published May 24, 2021 at 10:32 AM.