If you’ve ever had a kitchen redone, you know the first couple of weeks don’t look like much. Somebody moves a gas line, a dumpster shows up in the driveway, and the cabinets you picked out are nowhere to be seen. That’s pretty much where things stand next to one of the underground tank farms at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington. The kitchen in this case just happens to be a nuclear waste treatment system.<\/p>\n
The Department of Energy said on October 30<\/a> that work is underway on the ground outside AP Farm, in Hanford’s 200 East Area. Old utilities are being demolished or moved, support trailers are going in, and there’s electrical and road work going on. All of it is prep for something called the Advanced Modular Pretreatment System, or AMPS.<\/p>\n AMPS isn’t treating any waste yet.<\/p>\n Right now it’s a work zone and a conceptual rendering. But DOE has some pretty big expectations for the thing that’s going to sit there, and they’re tied to a fight over how Hanford’s waste should end up in the ground.<\/p>\n Basically, it’s a bigger version of something that’s already running next door. Hanford’s Tank-Side Cesium Removal System, which everybody calls TSCR, has spent the last four years pulling cesium out of liquid tank waste right outside AP Farm. We’ve covered TSCR before<\/a>, back when it sat idle for six months.<\/p>\n Here’s the short version if you missed that one. Hanford’s 177 underground tanks hold about 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste left over from decades of plutonium production, and some of it is liquid. TSCR filters the solids out of that liquid, then pumps it through steel columns packed with a material that grabs onto cesium and doesn’t let go. DOE says that combination removes 99.9% of the radioactivity, which leaves a low-activity liquid the site’s glass plant can handle.<\/p>\n AMPS does the same job, with more hardware. Washington’s Department of Ecology, which regulates Hanford’s dangerous waste permits, says AMPS will have double TSCR’s processing capacity<\/a>. Run the two together and DOE says Hanford can pretreat a combined 3.6 million gallons of waste a year, three times what it manages today.<\/p>\n DOE’s October release doesn’t describe the hardware itself, so I went looking. The most recent design briefing I can find, which DOE gave the Hanford Advisory Board, called for two process modules with four ion exchange columns each, and pushed a third module off until later. Each module was designed to move 5 gallons a minute. Minutes from an earlier board meeting say the columns are the same size TSCR uses, and DOE says a new TSCR column weighs about 24,000 pounds. So if that design held, you’re looking at eight steel cylinders of roughly that weight, which is a lot of metal to haul out every time the cesium media fills up. I can’t confirm the design hasn’t changed since then, and DOE hasn’t published a column count with this announcement.<\/p>\n Then there are the trailers. A statement of work from Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure, the contractor that runs the tanks and manages the AMPS project, lists a 36-by-60-foot triple-wide mobile office for construction staff near AP Farm. That’s a fairly roomy office by job-site standards.<\/p>\n So why would DOE want three times the pretreatment capacity when the system it already has is sitting still? It’s a fair question, and the answer’s downstream.<\/p>\n On October 27, DOE reported<\/a> that TSCR processed more than 222,000 gallons in its September run, the largest batch since it started operating. Crews then pulled the full columns, installed fresh ones, ran leak checks and wrapped up the turnaround in about two weeks. And then TSCR stopped, because Tank AP-106, where its output goes, didn’t have room for another batch. Ken Langdon, the contractor’s president, said the outage left TSCR ready “to run again as soon as space is available.”<\/p>\n That tank only drains as fast as the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, better known as the Vit Plant, can take from it. The Vit Plant mixes pretreated waste with glass-forming materials, heats it to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit and pours it into stainless steel containers. It’s been in hot commissioning for a little over a year, and Bechtel, which built it, said in October that it had turned 250,000 gallons of tank waste into glass. DOE puts the plant’s maximum capacity at about 2 million gallons a year.<\/p>\n The bottleneck is the glass plant. Which means 3.6 million gallons of pretreated waste a year can’t all go into glass, even with the Vit Plant running flat out. DOE knows that. Frankly, it’s the whole point.<\/p>\n The extra waste is supposed to go into grout. Grout is basically a cement-like mix, and the waste gets blended into it and left to harden into a solid block. DOE’s plan is to ship grouted waste out of Washington to a licensed commercial disposal site, while the Vit Plant keeps getting fed first.<\/p>\n DOE calls this its dual glass-plus-grout strategy, and AMPS is a big piece of it. Hanford Field Office Manager Ray Geimer said the current work “prepares the site for a higher-capacity tank-side treatment” that fits that plan.<\/p>\n DOE also attached some big numbers to it. The department says glass plus grout would let Hanford finish the low-activity tank waste mission in the 200 East Area by 2039, 12 years ahead of the 2051 date it would otherwise hit, and save taxpayers about $12 billion. Those are DOE’s projections. They aren’t results, and I’d treat them as a best case. Hanford timelines have a habit of stretching, as you’d expect from a project like this one, and site prep for the Vit Plant itself started back in 2001. It made its first glass last year.<\/p>\n Then there’s the paperwork. In August, DOE asked Ecology to change two permits so pretreated waste from AP-106 could be grouted and shipped out of state instead of waiting its turn for glass. As far as I can find, Ecology hasn’t approved those changes. AMPS needs its own permit change too, adding the new modules to Hanford’s dangerous waste permit, and the public comment period on that one ran from August 14 to October 13. I haven’t seen a final decision on it, and the release doesn’t say whether DOE needs one before it pours concrete.<\/p>\n Not everyone’s on board with grout, either. Some watchdog and environmental groups in Washington argue that cement doesn’t lock waste up as securely as glass does over the long haul. I’d guess that argument’s going to outlast the construction trailers.<\/p>\n DOE didn’t give a date. An older five-year site plan listed finishing construction and starting operations in fiscal 2029, but the new release doesn’t repeat that target, and I wouldn’t lean on it. It’s safe to assume the cesium filters already sitting next to AP Farm will be doing all of the pretreatment for a while yet.<\/p>\n If you’re curious how cramped Hanford’s tanks have gotten, our piece on the evaporator that boils tank waste at 125 degrees<\/a> to free up space is a good place to start.<\/p>\n For now, the work next to AP Farm is utility lines, trailers and roads. DOE announced that work on October 30, and as of its October 27 update, TSCR was ready to run its next batch as soon as AP-106 had room.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you’ve ever had a kitchen redone, you know the first couple of weeks don’t look like much. Somebody moves … <\/p>\nSo what is AMPS?<\/h2>\n
Hanford’s pretreating waste faster than it can make glass<\/h2>\n
Grout is the other half of DOE’s plan<\/h2>\n
So when does AMPS start treating waste?<\/h2>\n