On Friday, President Obama's Department of Energy announced the first of its final findings and determinations for major elements of the cleanup of WWII military radioactive waste tanks at the U.S. Department of Energy Hanford Reservation in Washington State on the Columbia River. DOE also announced its plans to entomb the Fast Flux Text Facility, also at Hanford, which was used to test breeder reactor development.
http://www.gpo.gov/...
Here is the News Release from the Department of Energy about the announcement.
This is from Friday's Federal Register:
This is the first in a series of Records of Decision (RODs) to
be issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) pursuant to the Final
Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement for
the Hanford Site, Richland, Washington (TC&WM EIS, DOE/EIS-0391,
December 2012). In this EIS, DOE considered alternatives for proposed
actions in three major areas: (1) Storing, retrieving, and treating
radioactive waste from 177 underground storage tanks (149 Single-Shell
Tanks [SSTs] and 28 Double Shell Tanks [DSTs]) at Hanford, and closure
of the 149 SSTs; (2) decommissioning of the Fast Flux Test Facility
(FFTF) and its auxiliary facilities; and (3) continued and expanded
waste management operations on site, including the disposal of
Hanford's low-level radioactive waste (LLW) and mixed low-level
radioactive waste (MLLW), and limited volumes of LLW and MLLW from
other DOE sites. The Final TC&WM EIS includes No Action alternatives to
the proposed actions in each of the three major areas, as required
under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). DOE's decisions
described herein pertain to all three major areas. DOE intends to issue
subsequent RODs as identified under SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION.
This Department of Energy video talks about the project to vitrify these waste liquids and sludges:
The former U.S. Atomic Energy Commission operated the Hanford Reservation with multiple nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel reprocessing plants during WWII for the purpose of producing plutoniun-239 for use in nuclear weapons. The nuclear fuel processing plants would take spent fuel from the military reactors and dissolve the spent nuclear fuel containing very large amounts of high level radioactive waste in nitric acid. This allowed separation of plutonium nitrate for recovery from the dissolved fuel rods so it could be refined for use as the principle component of nuclear weapons.
After plutonium and uranium nitrate was recovered from the solutions, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission practice was to take high level waste liquids/sludges and store them in carbon steel tanks, some single wall and some double wall. Such acid solutions would be corrosive to tank materials. In the 1970s in a well known incident, 115,000 gallons of such waste leaked from one such single wall carbon steel tank into groundwater under the tanks involved.
Some low level radioactive liquids were disposed in groundwater infiltration trenches during past operations at Hanford.
Here is a map to help you locate specific facilities at the Hanford Reservation.
Here is the Fast Flux Test Facility which will be entombed.
Here is the waste treatment and immobilization plant DOE is building that you saw in the video.
Here is the DOE web page for that development.
I'm nearly sure that this facility was the PUREX facility This was the plant used to recover plutonium and uranium nitrate from dissolved fuel rod solution. You can read more about that plant here.
Go on a Google Earth tour of the whole DOE Hanford Reservation.
5:03 PM PT: President Obama is NOT kicking the radioactive waste can down the road at Hanford, WA and his actions on the Hanford tank waste cleanup are the right thing to do for remediation at the DOE Hanford Reservation.
5:26 PM PT: If anyone thinks that what President Obama is doing at Hanford is the wrong thing to do, please let us know your view.
It is possible that there may be Democrats out there who are anti-nuclear power development who might feel threatened for non-scientific reasons by the prospect of DOE solving this radioactive waste problem and proceeding towards ultimate disposal.....and the effect of such a decision on temporary storage facilities and the prospect of a final disposal site for radioactive waste for the Hanford waste........all affecting decisions about geological disposal of vitrified or spent fuel rod wastes for civilian nuclear power development......including the prospect of doing so in Nevada or other state.
Lots of science, environmental protection and politics wrapped up in all of that and worthy of discussion.
Finally, I wanted to note that the DOE Hanford Project must have created a lot of jobs for Democrats. Anybody have anything to say about that?
6:15 PM PT: I should also point out that, in the history of the implementation and use of nuclear technologies, the Hanford nuclear fuel reprocessing is a sentinel event for the nuclear industry in the United States.
The reason it is a sentinel event is that Hanford is the largest site among a handful in the United States where historical nuclear fuel industrial reprocessing activities were a failure for a mix and variety of industrial process, worker radiological health protection, economic, environmental contamination and economic reasons.
This failure is significant because it led to a nuclear industry single use fuel rod approach followed by no re-use as an industry standard of operation that has lasted to the present.
6:35 PM PT: It is my understanding.....correct me if I'm wrong.....there is zero nuclear fuel reprocessing capacity operating in the United States, and there simply isn't anywhere in the U.S. where an electric utility operating or decommissioning a nuclear power plant can take their fuel rods to be reprocessed, reused or recycled.
The last nuclear fuel reprocessing plant that tried to operate in the United States was at Morris, IL and was a GE venture and it never went into commercial operation is my understanding.
6:40 PM PT: Other nuclear fuel reprocessing plants that were failures in the United States were [and this is from memory] at the Savannah River Complex in South Carolina, and at West Valley, NY.
Not sure if reprocessing was done/attempted at Lawrence Livermore lab, CA, Portsmith, OH or Oak Ridge, TN.
7:13 PM PT: President Obama's standing up for getting environmental remediation done at Hanford speaks to the reasons why I voted for him twice.
7:27 PM PT: If memory is correct, the Hanford Fast Flux Facility being entombed was the reactor for which fuel rods were being fabricated by a Kerr-McGee facility in Oklahoma that was the facility where Karen Silkwood worked.