The Department of Energy should stop work on the long-troubled, fabulously costly high-level nuclear waste (HLW) treatment plant at its closed Hanford weapons site in Washington state, according to the Government Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog agency.
DOE has been working on a pilot plant to mix some 3 million gallons high-level liquid waste left over from the Manhattan Project’s production plutonium of atomic weapons beginning in the 1940s at the Hanford Engineering Works on the Columbia River in southern Washington state. A total of about 54 million gallons of wastes are stored in over 170 large tanks, some of which are leaking. Production continued until 1987.
By GAO’s reckoning, the federal government eventually will have spent over $340 billion on the cleanup, which is now estimated to conclude by 2084.
In 2000, DOE launched its latest approach to dealing with the waste: mixing it with melted glass, allowing them to be isolated and disposed of in solid form. The project has been a failure from the beginning. DOE stopped construction in 2012 and has been trying to get it working since. The agency resumed construction in 2022 and, according to GEO, has spent some $200 million since then on the project.
GAO said it will take $20 billion to complete the vitrification project. “DOE intends to store the vitrified waste on-site at Hanford until the establishment of a deep geologic repository,” another so far failed DOE program which placed all its bets on Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which failed for technical and political reasons.
GAO found that “DOE has not fully addressed the challenges that led to the pause. DOE also has not considered all viable alternatives for addressing the HLW. While DOE analyzed alternatives for HLW treatment in 2023, it only evaluated alternatives that included vitrifying the waste in the HLW Facility. This limited evaluation was inconsistent with DOE requirements for developing such analyses.”
The investigation noted that an agreement this year among the agency, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Washington State Department of Ecology “proposed sweeping changes to DOE’s approach for cleaning up the Hanford Site. The agreement proposes that DOE reconfigure HLW Facility for a direct-feed approach under which DOE would send HLW directly to the HLW Facility and vitrify it. This approach would not rely on the Pretreatment Facility—stalled since 2012 due to technical challenges—originally intended to prepare the waste for treatment. However, the agreement does not specify how DOE would prepare the HLW for treatment in the absence of the Pretreatment Facility or how it would reconfigure the HLW Facility for the direct-feed approach.”
What to do? It’s time to stop spinning wheels and take a new, fundamental look at how to proceed: “GAO is recommending that Congress clarify DOE’s authority to manage portions of Hanford’s tank waste as a waste type other than high-level radioactive waste. GAO is also making three recommendations to DOE, including that it pause work on the HLW Facility until it takes several actions, including considering other alternatives for addressing Hanford’s HLW.”
DOE pushed back on the recommendation that it halt work on the vitrification project. The agency argued that “pausing activity on the HLW Facility would be in conflict with existing cleanup milestones and proposed changes to those milestones in the April 2024 agreement.”
GAO disagreed with DOE “because the current deadline for DOE to complete the HLW Facility is more than 9 years from the date of this report. Further, the April 2024 proposed agreement indicates that the parties intend to modify this deadline as additional information is developed.”
–Kennedy Maize
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