What We Are Doing
Preparing for Disposal
The mission of the DOE Office of River Protection and its contractors is to reduce the risk to the environment posed by the high-level radioactive waste in Hanford’s 177 underground tanks, immobilize the waste in glass in the Waste Treatment Plant, and safely store it until a national repository is opened. It will be the job of Washington River Protection Solutions to feed the waste from the tanks to the Waste Treatment Plant which is now under construction.
A major challenge is developing the technology needed to safely and efficiently sample and retrieve the waste from Hanford’s tanks. The waste is a diverse mix of radioactive and hazardous materials that varies from liquids to sludges to rock-hard solids. To date, seven tanks have been emptied and work is under way on several more.
Another challenge is putting in place the infrastructure necessary to transfer waste from tank to tank and from the tank farms to the Waste Treatment Plant. Underground transfer lines are in place to move waste between the 200 West and 200 East areas; a distance of about five miles. The transfer line that will feed the WTP Pretreatment Facility is also in place. Temporary aboveground hose-in-hose transfer lines are used to move waste from tank to tank.
WRPS is supporting the Waste Treatment Plant by testing a key analysis method: laser ablation. The technology, which will be used in the WTP Analytical Laboratory, is being tested in the 222-S Laboratory. Laser ablation will be a primary analytical tool in the plant’s analytical laboratory. It will be used to analyze the solid waste that is fed to the High Level Waste Vitrification Facility as well as the waste glass to ensure they meet all regulatory requirements. The process will allow the plant to prepare samples, analyze their chemical composition and get the results back to the operations staff within one shift. The system uses a high-power laser to vaporize a small bit of solid waste to form an aerosol. The aerosol is transferred into plasma where the emitted light is analyzed in a spectrograph. The chemical composition of the waste is determined by analyzing the wavelengths of light emitted by the plasma.
In addition to technology development and infrastructure upgrades, Washington River Protection Solutions is investing in people. Ensuring that the personnel, training, procedures and experience is in place for a first-class nuclear operations company is of utmost importance. When the Waste Treatment Plant is ready to begin operation, WRPS will have the needed resources in place to safely commission and operate the complex plant.
