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Introduction

In 1943, as part of the Manhattan Project, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation was established with the mission to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons. During 45 years of operations, the Hanford Site produced about 67 metric tonnes of plutonium—approximately two-thirds of the nation’s stockpile. Production processes generated radioactive and other hazardous wastes and resulted in airborne, surface, subsurface, and groundwater contamination. Presently, 177 underground tanks contain collectively about 210 million liters (about 56 million gallons) of waste. The chemically complex and diverse waste is difficult to manage and dispose of safely because of several factors, including: use of a variety of methods for plutonium extraction from irradiated nuclear fuel, mixing of wastes among tanks from transfers to optimize tank utilization, prior efforts to neutralize or otherwise alter the waste, recovery of cesium-137 and strontium-90, and addition of materials to the tanks from auxiliary processes (Peterson et al., 2018).

PROPOSED TREATMENT PLAN FOR THE HANFORD NUCLEAR RESERVATION’S TANK WASTE

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management (DOE-EM) is responsible for managing and cleaning up the waste and contamination under a legally binding Tri-Party Agreement (TPA) with the Washington State Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Over the past three decades, expenditures have been more than $19 billion on several different treatment strategies for the tank waste (GAO, 2017). DOE-EM has estimated that that the waste treatment will require an additional four to five decades at a cost of more than $50 billion.

To process the tank waste for disposal, DOE-EM has been constructing at Hanford the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). The plan is to retrieve the waste from the tanks to produce two waste streams, high-level waste (HLW) and low-activity waste (LAW), by removing several specific radionuclides that contribute most of the radioactivity. DOE-EM estimates that the HLW will contain more than 90 percent of the radioactivity and less than 10 percent of the volume of the total waste while LAW will consist of less than 10 percent of the radioactivity and more than 90 percent of the volume. The WTP will use vitrification, or immobilization in glass waste forms, to treat both the high- and low-activity fractions of the HLW feed material. The high-activity fraction is slated for disposal in a deep geological repository at a site to be determined. The low-activity waste is intended to be disposed in near-surface facilities, which can include the Integrated Disposal Facility (IDF) at Hanford. The WTP is designed to have the capacity to vitrify at least one-third and perhaps up to one-half of the LAW in tandem with all of the HLW; indeed, concurrent vitrification of this fraction of the LAW is essential to maintaining the throughput of the overall HLW vitrification process.

To treat the remaining portion of the LAW while keeping the HLW treatment on track, DOE-EM wants to increase LAW treatment capacity by building an additional facility for “supplemental treatment.” As currently envisioned, the supplemental low-activity waste (SLAW) would be similar in composition to the WTP’s LAW stream. DOE-EM has yet to formally select a supplemental treatment approach. While many stakeholders have assumed vitrification will be used, DOE is considering one or more of the following approaches:

1. Vitrification, to produce glass waste forms, either using Joule-heated melters, which are to be used in the WTP, or bulk vitrification;
2. Grouting, to produce cementitious waste forms; or
3. Fluidized-bed steam reforming, which can produce a calcine powder or a monolithic crystalline ceramic waste form.

Additional treatment approaches might also be identified and considered, although no sufficiently mature or demonstrated technologies have yet been identified. However, to implement the three currently identified approaches, additional waste conditioning (pre-treatment) might be needed, for example, to remove certain radionuclides, or adjust the composition of the waste to make it suitable for treatment.

CONGRESSIONAL MANDATE TO ANALYZE AND REVIEW THE ANALYSIS OF SUPPLEMENTAL TREATMENT APPROACHES

Under the TPA, by April 2015 DOE-EM was to have negotiated with the Washington State Department of Ecology to select a mutually acceptable supplemental treatment approach. To date, these negotiations have been unsuccessful. Consequently, to speed the negotiations, Congress has directed DOE-EM to obtain an analysis of supplemental treatment approaches. This directive is in Section 3134 of the National Defense Authorization Act of Fiscal Year 2017 (Sec. 3134). Sec. 3134 (see Appendix A) requires DOE to contract with a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) to perform this analysis. An FFRDC “is an activity sponsored under a broad charter by a Government agency (or agencies) for purpose of performing, analyzing, integrating, and/or managing basic or applied research and/or development, and that receives 70 percent or more of its financial support from the Government” (FAR 2.101).

In parallel, DOE was directed to contract with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (the National Academies) to conduct a concurrent, iterative review of the FFRDC report as it develops, so that the review results can inform and improve the FFRDC’s work. DOE contracted with Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL), an FFRDC, and then SRNL formed a team of experts from SRNL and other national laboratories. The charge to the FFRDC team from Sec. 3134 is shown in Appendix A. The Statement of Task is provided in Appendix B.

STUDY PROCESS

In this first review, the National Academies committee (the committee)¹ discusses its observations of the FFRDC’s publicly available work, as of February 28-March 1, 2018, the dates of the public meeting in Richland, Washington, when the FFRDC team presented its progress on its analysis to the committee, as well as to stakeholders and the interested public. Also, the committee received briefings and publicly available presentation slides from the FFRDC team during the first introductory meeting on December 12-13, 2017, in Washington, DC.² The webcast videos of these two public meetings are archived and available for viewing.³ Moreover, the committee has reviewed a set of draft working documents, which in this review report will be called the “FFRDC’s draft report,” which is dated February 14, 2018, and has been made publicly available.⁴Table 1-1 lists the contents of the draft report; when referencing information in the draft

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¹ For clarity, to the extent possible, this review report uses the nomenclature of team for the FFRDC’s investigators, the committee for the National Academies committee, the draft report for the FFRDC team’s work, and the review or review report for the committee’s work.

² For this public meeting’s presentations, see http://dels.nas.edu/Past-Events/Meeting-Supplemental-Treatment/DELS-NRSB-17-02/9656.

³ For the first public meeting’s video recording, see https://livestream.com/NASEM/DELS-NRSB; and for the second public meeting’s video recording, see http://www.tvworldwide.com/events/nas/180228/.

⁴ For the FFRDC’s draft report, see http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/nrsb/miscellaneous/FFRDCTeamWorkingDraft.pdf.

report, this review report will refer to the document number and document’s page number. Table 1-2 lists the FFRDC’s presentations from the second public meeting; when referencing particular presentations, this review report will refer to the presentation number.⁵ The FFRDC’s draft report and presentations from the second public meeting are the two references of the FFRDC’s work being considered by the committee in this review.

During the public meetings, the committee received briefings from several other presenters, as listed in Appendix C. Chapter 5 of this review provides a summary of the views from government agencies, Tribal Nations, other stakeholders, and interested members of the public. These views were expressed during the public meetings by oral presentations and written submissions; in addition, the National Academies have received comments submitted via e-mail and mail, which are available in the Public Access File. Sec. 3134 specifies that “the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine shall provide an opportunity for public comment, with sufficient notice, to inform and improve the quality of the review.” Also, Sec. 3134 highlights the necessity of consultation with the State of Washington and an opportunity for it to comment on the FFRDC’s draft report and the committee’s review of that report. It is planned that the FFRDC’s draft report will be completed during the summer and that its final draft report will be completed in the fall of 2018.

TABLE 1-1 List of Draft Working Documents in the FFRDC’s Draft Report, Dated February 14, 2018

TABLE 1-2 List of the FFRDC’s Presentations, Shown on February 28-March 1, 2018

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⁵ For the FFRDC’s presentations at the second public meeting, see http://dels.nas.edu/Past-Events/Meeting-Supplemental-Treatment/DELS-NRSB-17-02/9769.

Table 1-3 shows the current schedule for the FFRDC’s work, the committee’s review, the public meetings, and the briefings to stakeholders. While this schedule is subject to change, it is designed to allow adequate time for the FFRDC and the committee to do their work in the iterative fashion described in the Statement of Task, and for regulators, stakeholders, and the public to provide comments. The next public meeting at Richland, Washington, is scheduled for July 23-24, 2018.

Importantly, as Sec. 3134 makes clear, the committee’s overarching task is to provide a concurrent, independent peer review of the ongoing FFRDC’s analysis. The committee is neither charged to analyze the supplemental treatment approaches, nor charged to recommend any particular approach over another. Indeed, the committee understands from the first public presentation by the FFRDC on December 12, 2017, that the FFRDC itself will not identify a preferred option for supplemental treatment, but instead will evaluate the treatment alternatives against the baseline as well as to one another. Equally important, the committee notes what is not in the scope of the FFRDC’s analysis and the committee’s review, namely, tank waste management, HLW processing and treatment, and the WTP’s design, construction, and operations.

To perform its peer review task, the committee is composed of 14 experts whose expertise spans the issues relevant for reviewing the FFRDC’s analysis, including risk assessments, cost estimation, cost-benefit analysis, waste processing, supplemental treatment approaches, legal and regulatory requirements, and large scale nuclear construction projects. A majority of the members have prior experience in studying cleanup activities at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, as well as other DOE-EM sites. Appendix D contains relevant biographical information about the committee members’ qualifications and experiences. The committee could find it necessary to perform additional fact finding, for example, by receiving briefings from experts outside the FFRDC team about aspects of the supplemental conditioning, treatment, or analysis approaches. This additional fact finding could elucidate issues that have arisen or will arise during the presentations at the public meetings. Any information learned by the committee during additional fact finding will be made available in the study’s Public Access File.

The committee appreciates that the FFRDC has been responsive by sending its draft working documents for timely review and has shown significant progress since the first public meeting in mid-December 2017. Because the FFRDC’s analysis is at an early stage, much additional work remains to be done, and the FFRDC stated at the second public meeting that it intends to address this work in its forthcoming report.

TABLE 1-3 Planned Schedule of Forthcoming Public Meetings, the FFRDC’s Reports, and Committee’s Reviews

REVIEW REPORT ORGANIZATION

The remainder of this review report is structured in the order of the charges in the Statement of Task (see Appendix B) as follows:

• Chapter 2 provides the committee’s review of the technical quality and completeness of the methods used to conduct the risk, cost-benefit, schedule, and regulatory compliance assessments and their implementation.
• Chapter 3 discusses the committee’s review of the waste conditioning and supplemental treatment approaches considered in the FFRDC’s draft assessments.
• Chapter 4 describes the committee’s review of key information and data used in the FFRDC’s draft report and presentations.
• Chapter 5 summarizes comments and input received from stakeholders and interested members of the public as well as the committee’s observations of these comments.

The structure of each subsequent chapter is first to summarize key points that the FFRDC has in its draft report and presentations for each topic or charge to the committee. These key points can also consider issues raised by stakeholders and interested members of the public. Second, after these summaries of key points, the committee makes observations about points of clarification and information it anticipates that the FFRDC will provide in the future. Third, the committee provides some suggestions for consideration by the FFRDC to help the FFRDC’s analysis. Please note that because the FFRDC’s work at this stage is still draft and not yet complete, the committee does not make definitive recommendations. The committee anticipates that such recommendations would follow after it receives the FFRDC’s complete draft analysis, expected in July 2018.