PHOENIX - Senior federal and contractor officials from EM’s Office of River Protection at Hanford discussed the progress being made on the direct-feed low activity waste (DFLAW) approach for treating Hanford’s tank waste during a panel discussion here last week at the 2017 Waste Management Symposium.
“We have a very focused and dedicated team" at ORP, said Manager Kevin Smith, who led the discussion. The panel included representatives from ORP; Bechtel National Inc. (BNI), the contractor responsible for the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) project; and Washington River Protection Solutions, responsible for the Hanford tank farms. Hanford was one of the feature DOE sites at this year’s conference.
DFLAW is intended to allow EM to begin vitrifying Hanford tank waste as soon as 2022. Vitrification involves combining the tank waste with glass-forming materials and then heating the mixture to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit. The material is then poured into stainless steel containers, where it cools to a solid glass form facilitating long-term storage. DFLAW will use the WTP Low-Activity Waste (LAW) Facility, Analytical Laboratory, and other ancillary support facilities. These sections of WTP are closer to completion than the two other main sections of WTP - the High-Level Waste and Pretreatment facilities.
Peggy McCullough, BNI project director at WTP, outlined what she described as the “excellent progress" being made on the various components of the DFLAW approach. BNI is working to complete construction of the WTP LAW Facility this winter, ahead of a contractual milestone of June 2018. The last major piece of equipment---the caustic scrubber---was installed at the LAW Facility in February, and BNI is in the final stages of completing the facility’s two melters, McCullough said. In addition, the design for a new facility needed at the WTP as part of the DFLAW approach, the Effluent Management Facility, is almost 80 percent complete, she said.
ORP Assistant Manager for the WTP, Bill Hamel highlighted several of the benefits of a new contract modification DOE and BNI finalized late last year to complete and implement the DFLAW approach. The contract modification contains sets of “deliberate and very strategic" milestones related to engineering and construction work and commissioning activities to effectively incentivize BNI for successful completion, he said. BNI has the ability to earn a significant amount of fee for completing activities ahead of schedule, but also is at risk of losing significant amounts of fee for delays.
“That is a very powerful feature," Hamel said.
While some construction activities are still underway, DOE and its contractors are already beginning some startup and commissioning activities at the WTP facilities involved with the DFLAW approach. Delmar Noyes, WTP startup, commissioning and integration assistant manager at ORP, said he had recently spent four months at the Salt Waste Processing Facility at the Savannah River Site to observe and learn from startup activities there. One key lesson, he said, is that it is a “huge transition" from the construction phase to the startup and commissioning phase.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Environmental Management
