There’s no turning back at the Hanford site’s vitrification plant after the heat up of the world’s largest melter for radioactive waste started Saturday, 20 years after construction of the plant began.
The 300-ton melter now must remain hot continuously around the clock as it initially makes practice glass and eventually starts glassifying radioactive waste for the first time at the nuclear reservation.
Glassification prepares the waste for permanent disposal.
“Permanently removing the waste from Hanford’s tanks and solidifying it is one of the most important elements of the entire cleanup mission, and melter heat up is an extremely important step in that process,” said David Reeploeg,
the Tri-City Development Council vice president for federal programs and the executive director for Hanford Communities, a coalition of Hanford area local governments.
The Department of Energy’s goal is to start vitrifying radioactive waste stored in underground tanks, some since World War II, by the end of 2023.
The 580-square-mile Hanford nuclear reservation near Richland in Eastern Washington
produced about two-thirds of the nation’s plutonium for its nuclear weapons program from World War II through the Cold War.
Uranium fuel irradiated at Hanford was chemically reprocessed to remove plutonium. The mix of radioactive and other hazardous chemical waste from reprocessing has been stored in underground tanks and many of them prone to leaking. They hold 56 million gallons of the waste until it can be treated for disposal.
The melter that is being heated up is the first of two at the $17 billion plant’s Low Activity Waste Facility and is expected to operate continuously for at least five years.
“When we finish heating up the first melter, that will be another significant step in commissioning the Waste Treatment and
Immobilization Plant for future operations,” said Val McCain, project director for Bechtel National.
Bechtel holds the contract for building, starting up and commissioning the waste treatment, or vitrification, plant to prepare it to treat radioactive waste.
DOE and Bechtel plan a “disciplined approach” to heating up the first melter to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit, said Brian Vance, DOE’s Hanford site manager.
Workers are expected to spend about two weeks gradually heating the melter as glass beads are added in batches to be melted during the initial test run. The molten glass that results will be poured into a stainless steel container and removed from the building.
Once the melter is fully commissioned and begins to treat radioactive waste, the glassified radioactive waste it produces will be buried at the Integrated Disposal Facility, a
lined landfill in central Hanford.
Initially, the vitrification plant will only treat some of
the least radioactive tank waste, called low activity waste.
Construction on the plant’s High
Level Waste Facility has been mostly stalled since 2012 when technical issues were raised, causing DOE to shift its focus to treating low activity waste first.
DOE faces a federal court deadline to also be treating high level radioactive waste, in addition to the initial treatment of low activity waste, by 2033 and to have the vit plant fully operating by 2036.
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