The Catholic University of America’s (CUA) Vitreous State Laboratory (VSL) has received a $31m four-year contract to help the US Department of Energy (DOE) its nuclear waste clean-up effort at the Hanford site in Washington state.
VSL, founded in 1968, has been assisting with the clean-up since 1996 by researching safer and more cost-effective methods of converting radioactive waste into glass (vitrification), which immobilises and stabilises the material so it can be stored safely.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the Hanford site consists of a 26-square-mile area located 35 miles north of Richland, Washington, along the Columbia River, where nine water-cooled plutonium production reactors were constructed between 1943 and 1963. The site supplied plutonium to the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bombs used Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WWII.
The last of the nine reactors ceased operations in the late 1980s. While they were operating, the facilities dumped contaminated water containing radioactive materials into the Columbia River and into the surrounding soil and groundwater.
The current project aims to convert 56m gallons of radioactive waste currently stored in 177 ageing underground tanks at the site into glass. Under the DOE contract, VSL will collaborate with several other agencies to construct the largest nuclear waste vitrification facility in the world, the Hanford Waste Treatment & Immobilisation Plant.
VSL has received grants worth millions of dollars in the past for Hanford site projects, but this is the largest single award so far, according to the CUA press release. VSL maintains the largest collection of glass melters in the US, including a 30-tonne, one-third scale prototype of the glass melters that will be used at Hanford.
“This contract is a real vote of confidence in what we have done in the past and our capabilities going forward,” said Ian Pegg, VSL Director and professor of physics at CUA. “It’s a recognition of the expertise, experience, and unique facilities of VSL.”
The planned high-level waste facility will melt waste using glass-forming chemicals in two large melters operating at 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit. The molten glass will then be poured into stainless steel containers for interim safe storage, prior to permanent disposal, the press release said. Testing of the system without radioactive waste is expected to begin by 2032.
VSL also conducts research and development for nuclear waste treatment programmes at sites in South Carolina and Idaho as well as abroad at sites in the UK and in Japan.
Researched and written by Judith Perera
