Remote handling equipment at the hanford waste treatment plant

Cold war plutonium production led to extensive amounts of radioactive waste stored in tanks at the Department of Energy's Hanford Waste Treatment Plant. The storage tanks could potentially leak into the ground water and into the Columbia River. The solution for this risk of the leaking waste is vitrification. Vitrification is a process of mixing molten glass with radioactive waste to form a stable condition for storage. The Department of Energy has contracted Bechtel National, Inc. to build facilities at the Hanford site to process the waste. The waste will be separated into high and low level waste. Four major systems will process the waste, two pretreatment and two high level. Due to the high radiation levels, high integrity custom cranes have been designed to remotely maintain the hot cells. Several critical design parameters were implemented into the remote machinery design, including radiation limitations, remote operations, Important to Safety features, overall equipment effectiveness, minimum wall approaches, seismic constraints, and recovery requirements. Several key pieces of equipment were designed to meet these design requirements - high integrity crane bridges, trolleys, main hoists, mast hoists, slewing hoists, a monorail hoist, and telescoping mast deployed tele-robotic manipulator arms. There were unique and challenging design features and equipment needed to provide the remotely operated high integrity crane/manipulator systems for the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant. The cranes consist of a double girder bridge with various main hoist capacities ranging from one to thirty ton and are used for performing routine maintenance. A telescoping mast mounted tele-robotic manipulator arm with a one-ton hook is deployed from the trolley to perform miscellaneous operations in-cell. A dual two-ton slewing jib hoist is mounted to the bottom of the trolley and rotates 360 degrees around the mast allowing the closest hook wall approaches. Each of the two hoists on this slewer is mounted 180 degrees opposite each other. Another system utilizes a single one-ton slewing jib hoist that can extend and retract as well as rotate 270 degrees around the mast. Yet, another system utilizes an under-hung monorail trolley with one-ton hoist capacity mounted to the bottom of the bridge girder. The main, slewer and monorail hoists each have power-rotating hooks for installing and removing equipment in the hot cell. (authors)