Effort to lock Hanford's radioactive waste in glass faces more delays

[TexasTowelie]

Already 12 years behind schedule, a project at the Hanford nuclear complex meant to transform millions of gallons of radioactive waste into benign glass faces yet another delay.

Since the 1990s, Washington state has been prodding the U.S. Department of Energy to build two “glassification” plants at Hanford that would permanently contain the waste stored in aging tanks on the site. Delays have added to the cost of the project, now estimated at $17 billion.

Glassification was supposed to begin in 2007. On the current schedule, lower-level radioactive waste wouldn’t be entombed in glass cylinders until 2023. And the high-level radioactive wastes? At present, glassification of that waste is set to begin in 2036, 29 years behind the original deadline.

The Energy Department wants to push that target back even further, and last month began negotiations with state leaders to do so. Those negotiations are also expected to address whether additional tanks must be built to hold the waste, a move the state supports, but which the DOE has been reluctant to adopt

Read more: https://www.hcn.org/articles/energy-and-industry-effort-to-lock-hanfords-radioactive-waste-in-glass-faces-more-delays
(High Country News)

[RainCaster]

1. They promised us vitrification in the 60s.

When I was a kid growing up there, they would give us tours of the Hanford Science Center. Those tours always ended with us kids getting black glass marbles and a speech about how "very soon" the wastes would be turned in to these harmless bits of glass. Fifty plus years later, it's still a vacant promise.