RICHLAND, Wash. - EM’s Office of River Protection (ORP) and contractor Bechtel National, Inc. (BNI) recently installed two 40-ton process cell pipe racks into the Effluent Management Facility (EMF), part of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) at Hanford.
EMF is the final WTP support building required to deliver the Direct Feed Low-Activity Waste (DFLAW) vitrification approach.
The pipe racks are steel structures that will allow utilities to be run between areas of the facility to connect equipment and systems. Each rack measures roughly 25 feet tall, 20 feet wide, and 70 feet long and required a heavy lift crane to install. After the rack modules were moved into the main process facility, workers began bulk pipe installations within the building footprint.
EMF work crews pre-fabricated and pre-assembled many of the equipment and pipe rack modules outside the facility before lifting them into place inside. This allowed installation work to continue inside the building, making more efficient use of space and enhancing safety.
During vitrification operations, secondary liquids will be generated from the Low-Activity Waste (LAW) Facility melter off-gas system. These liquids will then go to the EMF where excess water is evaporated and transferred to the nearby Liquid Effluent Retention Facility, while the remaining concentrate is sent back into the vitrification process.
“The team continues to make tremendous progress on construction of this critical Vit Plant support facility," said Jason Young, ORP’s federal project director for the EMF. “In addition, nearly half of the Balance of Facilities systems have completed startup testing and are well into the early commissioning phase as we get closer to starting DFLAW operations."
The DFLAW approach is expected to enable treatment of low-activity waste to begin in advance of a court-ordered milestone date of 2023. This approach will increase available double-shell tank space and provide valuable lessons learned to aid startup and commissioning of other portions of the WTP.
Source: U.S. Dept. of Energy, Office of Environmental Management
