7-30-22

The Evergreen State Holds Federal Taxpayers Hostage to Hanford Nuclear Waste Cleanup

By Robert L. Ferguson

The Biden administration made folks in Washington state happy with its proposal to boost funding for the cleanup of the sprawling 580-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation along the Columbia River by $191 million in fiscal year 2023, bringing the total budget to just over $2.6 billion.

As The Columbian reported on June 9, the Hanford reservation was “used from World War II through the Cold War to produce nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program, leaving behind millions of gallons of radioactive waste and contaminated buildings, soil, debris and groundwater.”

But what the local newspaper didn’t report is that lawmakers and activists in The Evergreen State are holding the U.S. Department of Energy hostage to an outdated 33-year-old agreement that will cost U.S. taxpayers up to $630 billion to finish the cleanup of nuclear waste on the Hanford reservation.

The feds are indeed obligated, morally and financially, to clean up the 56 million gallons of nuclear waste on the Hanford site in the safest and most efficient method possible. But Washington state’s Department of Ecology has fanatically insisted that all nuclear waste stored at Hanford, even the waste that has been treated and rendered to low-level wastewater, must be vitrified.

Vitrification is a costly and complicated method of immobilizing the waste into a glass substance. For years, the state Department of Ecology has chanted the mantra that nothing else is “as good as glass” for immobilizing and disposing of Hanford’s tank waste, but that has never been scientifically true.

There’s a far less expensive and more efficient way to clean up Hanford. It’s called grouting—a process that uses dry inorganic materials to immobilize low-level waste in a cement-like wasteform. Grouting Hanford’s low-level waste is estimated to be one-fifth the cost of vitrification and could be done in half the time, according to a new July 2022 U.S. Government Accountability Office report. And there are licensed and permitted commercial facilities in place in America ready to dispose of this grouted low-level waste, just as they do from commercial nuclear power plants, hospitals and laboratories.

Since 2018, Congress has allocated $17 million to fund a commercial-scale demonstration of the grouting method and offsite disposal of Hanford’s low-level tank waste. The U.S. Department of Energy could begin right now to grout the 300,000 or so gallons of low-level waste it has already pumped out of the tanks and treated using its Tank-Side Cesium Removal System, or TSCR.

The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the million-gallon tank storing the TSCR-treated waste will be filled by late summer this year, but the vitrification plant is not likely to become operational until 2025, even for testing the technical issues, and there are no guarantees that it will operate even then.

But Washington state lawmakers fear that any changes to the Tri-Party Agreement, the cleanup and compliance agreement for Hanford signed by the U.S. Department of Energy in 1989, will leave them powerless over the process and may cost the state money and jobs. The reality is that grouting the low-level waste is the only way to meet the cost and schedule deadlines of the Tri-Party Agreement.

Grouting the waste also provides much lower risks to Hanford workers and the environment than vitrification. For every million gallons vitrified, 1.8 million gallons of processing liquid is dumped in the ground, plus up to a million more gallons of water is added to retrieve and move the waste around, while 34,000 tons of CO2 and 37 tons of ammonia go up the vitrification plant stacks, according to the Department of Energy’s own estimates.

Grouting rather than vitrification could avoid dumping into the atmosphere more than 150,000 tons of CO2 emissions (equivalent to approximately 30,000 internal combustion cars) per year for the next 50 years. In short, grouting the low-level waste at Hanford is far cleaner, safer, and faster than vitrification.

Reports cited in this article by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and six National Laboratories acknowledge that commercial grouting and disposal of low-level waste at one of the licensed and approved waste disposal sites in Texas or Utah would shave decades off the schedule and save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. That savings is enough to buy 250 Boeing 747s or eight new nuclear powered aircraft carriers.

Nuclear waste cleanup of the Hanford reservation is a national issue. One state should not be able to hold the nation’s taxpayers hostage to a three-decades old poor technological decision. Hanford’s 70-year-old underground storage tanks are prone to leaking, and the alternative grout method is immediately available to start immobilizing and disposing of its low-level nuclear waste in a manner that is safer, faster, and at significantly less cost to the nation.

On behalf of the American taxpayers, Congress needs to tell the Department of Energy to move forward with grouting and disposing of waste today at Hanford.

Mr. Ferguson is a former deputy assistant energy secretary and the author of “Nuclear Waste in Your Backyard: Who’s to Blame and How to Fix It.” He is a founding member of Northwest Energy Associates, a nonprofit dedicated to accelerating Hanford cleanup.

11/11/21

NEA’s Opinion: Dept. of Ecology is wrong that all Hanford waste must be vitrified

A November letter from law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius representing Waste Control and Storage Services (WCS) in Texas provides input to DOE on the revised draft Environmental Assessment for the Test Bed Initiative (TBI). The TBI demonstration will show that waste can be pretreated to become low-level waste and safely immobilized in grout and shipped out of the state of Washington to a repository site such as WCS in Texas. This letter makes clear that the Washington State Department of Ecology is wrong in stating that “all tank waste from the Hanford Site must be vitrified prior to disposal.”

The legal analysis in this letter states that Ecology’s comments confuse the public and unnecessarily attempt to distinguish synonymous terms. Ecology disregards DOE’s express authority to regulate the radioactive portion of mixed waste under the Atomic Energy Act. The Dept of Ecology is misapplying regulatory guidance on the proper scope and timing of the hazard determination for waste undergoing a “new point of generation.”

Ecology’s recent public suggestion that WCS “might return waste to the state of Washington after they have received it” is without basis or logic. WCS has developed a safe waste repository with a federal permit to permanently store grouted waste such as the low-level waste from Hanford tanks.

Northwest Energy Associates believes that the Washington State Department of Ecology is overreaching its regulatory authority to block the TBI demonstration because it will show that low-level waste, which constitutes 90 percent of the 56 million gallons of waste in Hanford tanks, can be safely grouted and removed from the state for offsite disposal. Grouting the low-level waste instead of vitrifying material that is essentially wastewater, will save billions of dollars and decades of time.

1/7/21

NEA’s Opinion: Judge Peterson’s order modifying the Consent Decree lets DOE off the hook

The NEA reminds the DOE’s Office of River Protection (DOE-ORP) that it could begin tank waste treatment at Hanford almost immediately if it would submit its permit request to the Washington State Department of Ecology.

Dueling Op-eds (Tri-City Herald): Northwest Energy Associates vs. Department of Ecology

Nov. 17, 2020 — NEA asks Ecology to work with DOE to implement the Phase 2 demonstration of the Low-Level Waste Offsite Disposal instead of abusing its regulatory authority to block tank waste cleanup in favor of the financially unsustainable and unworkable plan to vitrify all tank waste.

Nov. 24, 2020 — Ecology issues a rebuttal, but no commitment.

10/18/20

Advanced Reactor Technology is a Welcome Addition to Our Vision for a Hanford Clean Energy R&D Park

Northwest Energy Associates (NEA) congratulates Energy Northwest for its partnership on two of the projects awarded by DOE from the Advanced Reactor Demonstration Program. Energy Northwest will collaborate with the project awardees to demonstrate new advanced nuclear power reactor designs. According to the Tri-City Herald, it raises the possibility that one of the reactor projects might eventually be built near Richland.

9/27/20

DOE Extends WRPS Contract for Another Year

Northwest Energy Associates is of at least three minds about the Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) contract extension!   Read more…

9/24/20

WESF High-Risk Cleanup Delayed  

Two different organizations have recently brought attention to the high-risk status of the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility (WESF) on the Hanford Site and the U.S. Department of Energy’s current plan to delay its cleanup. Read more…