Recommendation for Supplemental Technologies for Potential Mission Acceleration

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of River Protection (ORP), is responsible for the remediation and stabilization of the Hanford Site tank farms, including 53 million gallons of highly radioactive mixed waste contained in 149 single-shell tanks (SST) and 28-double-shell tanks (DST). This program is called the River Protection Project (RPP). The current plan calls for all wastes retrieved from the tanks to be transferred to a new Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) where they will be chemically partitioned to separate the highly radioactive materials requiring permanent isolation (high-level waste [HLW]) from very large volumes of chemical wastes. The HLW constituents will be vitrified, stored onsite, and ultimately disposed of in the offsite national repository. The less radioactive chemical waste, referred to as low-activity waste (LAW), will be vitrified and then disposed of onsite in trenches that comply with the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA). Current estimates for this mission predict completion around 2070 if no additional processing facilities are deployed. A second LAW vitrification plant and expansion of the HLW vitrification capacity will be required to achieve commitments made in the Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order (Ecology 1989), also know as the Tri-Party Agreement