The US Department of Energy is constructing the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant which is the largest waste pretreatment and vitrification facility in the world. This massive facility will begin . commissioning operations in 2009, with full scale production beginning in 201 1. While this facility will provide a much needed waste treatment capability to meet the department's accelerated cleanup goals for closure of the Hanford waste tank systems, it alone will not provide enough capacity to complete the waste treatment mission by the 2028 regulatory milestone. The 53 million gallons of waste present in tanks today contains about 48,000 metric tomes of waste sodium. At present, the quantity of sodium contained in the waste is the overall schedule limiting factor and is used as an indicator of progress to completion of the waste treatment mission. Sodium content, in general, flows to the low activity waste side and is the limiting chemical constituent in the Low Activity Waste (LAW) waste treatment system. One of the principal objectives of the overall strategy is to enhance the ability of the LAW system to treat wastes containing this sodium, which in turn accelerates the completion of the waste treatment end date.
PDF
download
878987797
028-85220240
