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Glass Nightmare: Cleansing the Hanford Cold War Nuclear Heritage

For three decades, scientists cleaned 177 gigantic tanks of radioactive mud at the Hanford Complex. And this work has just begun.



The Hanford facility in southern Washington produced weapons-grade plutonium during World War II and the Cold War. The Hanford Wit Factory is designed to clean up the waste from this nuclear legacy.

This place is described using superlatives. Journalists called it the most polluted place in the western hemisphere. Also on this site is one of the largest construction projects in the world .

The Hanford Site in the south of the State of Washington under the sandy soil buried 177 giant tanks to the brim filled with radioactive residues 44 years of production of radioactive materials. Since World War II and throughout the Cold War, HF has been producing plutonium, from which more than 60,000 nuclear charges, including the atomic bomb, were createdobliterated Nagasaki in August 1945 . The growing production eventually polluted the soil and groundwater, leaving behind 212 million liters of toxic waste - enough to fill 85 Olympic-sized pools. For several decades, the complex has not produced plutonium, and the US government still can not figure out how to clean this area.



Today it is a complex with an area of ​​1,500 km 2 , which is about half of Rhode Island [or comparable to St. Petersburg / approx. trans.], is a field overgrown with wormwood and rare grass near Richland in Wash Bay. Underground tanks of steel and reinforced concrete are grouped into "farms" and are located under the central plain, and mothballed nuclear reactors surround them like sentries. Scientists have already found 1800 different pollutants inside these tanks, including plutonium, uranium, cesium, aluminum, iodine and mercury. All this mass, as thick as peanut butter, and salt cakes, reminiscent of the wet sand on the beach, are flooded with water.



All this waste was left from active war times and Cold War innovations. Since 1943, Hanford experts were the first to develop safe industrial methods for the chemical separation of plutonium and irradiated uranium. Their initial bismuth-phosphate process produced plutonium “pills” the size of a hockey puck, from which they then formed the cores, and were used first for testing the Trinity atomic bomb in New Mexico in 1945, and then for the bomb dropped by the Americans on Nagasaki. Over the years of development, experts have come up with five different processes, culminating in a purure process (plutonium uranium extraction, PUREX ), which has become a global standard for the processing of nuclear fuel.

Each of the methods generated its own waste, which was stored at the processing site, and then pumped into underground storage facilities. When some of the old single-wall tanks began to leak after many years, workers pumped liquids into new, more reliable double-walled tanks. When mixing different wastes, different chemical reactions took place, as a result of which each tank was filled with its own complex mixture of liquids, solids and sludge.

As a result, when in 1987 the Hanford complex stopped producing plutonium, a deadly brew of chemicals, metals, and long-lasting radionuclides was in storage. Among 177 tanks there are no pairs with the same mixture inside, but all of them pose a significant risk to the public. The complex is bordered bythe Columbia River , which supplies water to local potato fields and vineyards, serves as a breeding ground for salmon, and provides drinking water for millions of people. So far, about 4 million liters of fluid have leaked out of aging and rusting tanks. Some experts believe that sooner or later even more waste will leak from there.

The United States Department of Energy ( DOE ), which runs the Hanford facility, has been trying for decades to approach processing and vitrification", or glassing waste for safe storage. Vitrification is a time-tested method of immobilizing radioactive waste by converting it into glass blocks. Harmful radionuclides enclosed in such a shell cannot reach rivers or groundwater. To improve insulation, most of the radioactive blocks are placed in steel containers that are then stored in a dry and geologically stable underground storage Vitrification factories have been built and are successfully operating in Belgium, France, Germany, Russia, Britain and the USA.


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However, the waste at Hanford is unique compared to global peers, both in composition and volume. Before turning them into glass, workers first need to understand what exactly is inside each tank, and then develop formulas for producing glass for each batch.

This is a monumental task - and it represents only one facet of the largest engineering project in the world. In the center of all the work are several large enterprises under the general name “Waste Maintenance and Removal Plant”, or the Hanford Vit Factory [from “vitrification”], spread over 25 hectares. Today, according to DOE estimates, to complete the construction of the factory, which is the company Bechtel Nationaland a handful of contractors, $ 16.8 billion will be needed. While scientists are unaware of the waste contained in Hanford's storage facilities, and contractors are supplying electricity to new buildings, clouds of problems hang over the project - from huge excesses of estimates and serious construction errors to deadlines. The Hanford complex, which was born in a hurry and was being built in the heat of World War II, is slowly waddling a winding path to a finishing line hiding somewhere far away.

“Hanford is a unique project,” says Will Eaton , project manager for the glass transition at the Pacific National Northwest Laboratory ( PNNL) Department of Energy in Richland. “We have worked on many details to ensure the greatest likelihood of real, effective success. Because this project is long. ” “My goal is to run this factory before I retire,” adds 53-year-old Eaton.

I came to Eaton in July 2019 to better understand the many challenges facing this challenging vitrification project. I met him on a bright sunny day on the PNNL campus, located in an oasis of green trees growing in the middle of a steppe overgrown with small bushes. Hanford begins right across the street, and stretches up to the flat ridge of Mount Ratlesnake.

Eaton is holding a vessel of transparent plexiglass with a diameter of 13 cm. In May 2018, his team used similar containers to glass 11 liters of waste from two Hanford tanks. For safety, the experiment was carried out under the cover of a radioisotope vapor. So far, these tanks contain the largest samples of Hanford's vitrified waste - and this is after three decades of work and billions of dollars spent. It remains to vitrify only 211 999 989 liters.

1. Tanks



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After meeting with Eaton, I went to Hanford. DOE does not allow individual journalists to visit the vit factory, so I chose the closest option - I went along with a public excursion to the treatment plant. We, along with a dozen passengers, rode in an air-conditioned bus on a reservation, most of which resembles a desolate park. In the distance towered high mountains, cut by ancient rivers. Herds of deer searched for shadows under spindle-shaped trees near an abandoned school.

The sight is inappropriate, but bright. In 1943, as part of the Manhattan Project, the US government nationalized a vast territory, including the cities of White Bluffs and Hanford, in order to build a nuclear weapons complex on this site. The government ordered 1,500 households to leave their farms and cities, and Native Americans were barred from visiting holy sites where they engaged in fishing, hunting, and various rituals. To the west of this place, the Vanapum tribe still lives in a neighboring community.

The bus climbed the central plateau, and vast free territories were replaced by buzzing forklifts, helmets and buildings in the woods. Our guide noted that his great-nephew works here as a welder, and all in all there are builders in the amount of 2800 people.

The Wit Factory (from "vitrification") came about as a result of a comprehensive 1989 agreement concluded by DOE, the US Environmental Protection Agency, and the Washington State Department of the Environment. Construction began in 2002, which should have ended by 2011, and cost $ 4.3 billion. However, a number of serious unforeseen problems soon arose, including the dangerous accumulation of hydrogen in pipes and auxiliary tanks, inadequate ventilation for working with radon and other gases emitted in the decay of radioactive waste. The cost of construction has skyrocketed, and the time frame has moved away.

Today, the vit factory is a complex of buildings located on the square of a small city. 56 of its systems require a power grid that could power up to 2,250 houses. A water cooling system could cool the air in 23,500 homes. Diesel fuel would fit into a 1.3 million liter tank, which could fill up to 19,000 cars at once.


Some of the single-wall tanks have already leaked 4 million liters of waste into their surrounding soil and groundwater.

And even upon completion of the construction of a vit factory, waste treatment itself will take several decades. In the report In terms of cost, time frame and life cycle of the Hanford complex from 2019, DOE estimates that the process of glass transition and disposal of waste in Hanford will cost $ 550 billion and will take 60 years.

According to the plan, the waste should flow through underground pipes into a massive pre-treatment workshop. This workshop should ultimately be 12-story high, although during my tour only a contour of metal structures flaunted in its place, over which the yellow crane froze without movement. Inside the sealed tanks, pulse-jet mixers that work like pipettes will suck in the waste and shoot it at high speed so that the entire contents of the tank are mixed and solid particles do not settle. Ion-exchange plants will remove isotopes with high radioactivity, dividing the waste stream into two groups. Waste with high radioactivity contains about 10% of the total volume, but they are responsible for 90% of the radiation, says Eaton. The remaining waste is considered waste with low radioactivity,and contain very few radionuclides.

Different streams will be sent to the appropriate glass transition workshops for highly radioactive and low-radioactive waste. In both workshops, technicians will mix the waste with silicon and other glass-forming materials, and then pour it all into a smelter with ceramic walls. The electrodes immersed in it will heat the smelter to almost 1150 ° C, turning this mixture into a bright red mass of molten glass. Wastes with low radioactivity will be poured into stainless steel containers, where they will be cooled and solidified, turning into “logs” 2.3 m long and 1.2 m in diameter. Wastes with high radioactivity will be poured into longer and thinner canisters with a length of 4, 4 m and a diameter of 0.6 m from the same material.

By-gases, including steam and nitrogen oxides, will escape through a nozzle in the lid of the smelter, where they will be collected and cleaned of radioactive isotopes to prevent pollution from entering the environment.

Annually, up to 1000 such “logs” in a steel shell containing material with low radioactivity will leave the workshop and then plunge into the ground not far from there. An analytical laboratory will also be located in the complex, which will check 3,000 glass samples with low activity annually to ensure that vitrified waste complies with regulatory requirements.

After the completion of the construction of the high-level waste processing workshop, it will have to issue 640 cans per year. High activity vitrified wastes are considered too hazardous to be stored there, even when they are inside steel cans. Instead, they will be transported to a location as yet uncertain. According to the original plan, it was proposed to store these wastes in a deep geological repository such as the Yucca Mountain repository, which has long been planned to finish, but still can not. Construction of the storage facility began in 1994, but was frozen during the Obama administration due to the fierce resistance of politicians from Nevada, groups of American Indians, environmentalists and others. Trump in the early days as president defrosted construction, and recently changed his mind. To date, there are no plans to build a deep storage anywhere in the United States.

Meanwhile, Hanford experts are thinking about how to drastically reduce the number of glazed cylinders that they will have to produce and store. When builders began work on a vit factory 18 years ago, researchers developed a technology by which no more than 10% of waste will be contained in each glass log, and the rest will be made up of the material that forms the glass. The PNNL team, modeling various formulas, found that it could double the waste content, bringing it up to 20%, in particular thanks to new methods to store more aluminum, chromium and other chemicals there. This can halve the number of glass “logs” that need to be produced and stored at Hanford.

2. Vitrification




To work with radioactive waste, it is necessary to “vitrify” them into glass blocks, which will be safely stored. In other places around the world, vitrification has been successfully used to immobilize nuclear waste. But the waste at Hanford is so complex and varied that for each batch, scientists will have to come up with their own unique “recipe”. As a result, it was decided that vitrified low-level waste cylinders enclosed in stainless steel casings would be stored directly on the territory of the Hanford complex. Highly active waste will be transported to some other place that has not yet been selected.


1. In the pre-treatment workshop, the waste is divided into two streams.
2. Wastes are mixed with silicon and other glass-forming substances.
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The bus travels along a winding road through the Hanford complex, and we see dirty bald spots marking places where buildings used to stand in the period of plutonium production. Their fragments are now buried in a massive landfill, which stores more than 16 million tons of low-radioactive, hazardous and mixed waste. Hanford's employee on the bus points to black pipes snaking along the road; in them, polluted water is diverted away from the Columbia River, towards the central processing factory.

During the heyday of plutonium production, workers poured about 1.7 trillion liters of liquid waste into landfills bordering the soil. All this turned into huge underground flows of toxic chemicals, among which there were also carcinogenic compounds such as hexavalent chromium andcarbon tetrachloride . As a result, these substances penetrated into groundwater. Today, six underground pumping systems hydraulically push pollutants toward the 200th Western Groundwater Processing Plant - a large underground space filled with silver pipes and high gray bioreactors. The factory’s operator, CH2M Hill (today owned by the Jacobs Engineering Group), says it serves 7.6 billion liters of groundwater each year. In September 2019, workers removed the remains of highly radioactive liquid mud, which was stored in underwater containers near the river.

Our tour is over, and the bus goes back to the dusty plateau, past trucks with tacos and playful signs: “There is sediment left? And with us! ”

DOE claims that the construction of the low-activity substance glass transition shop, analytical laboratory, and most of the auxiliary buildings at the Vit factory is “almost completed.” However, work on the pretreatment workshop is “inhibited” - Hanford experts are trying to deal with technical issues related to waste separation and treatment and the estimated life of the factory equipment. At the end of 2016, officials also decided to delay the construction of a glass transition plant for highly active substances in order to concentrate on processing low-level waste.

In order to spur a solution to the issue of low-level waste, recently DOE decided to completely abandon the pre-treatment workshop. Instead, liquid waste will be pumped into a small system located next to the storage tanks. This system will filter out large solid pieces and remove radioactive cesium. The latter has a relatively short half-life, but at the same time emits a large amount of gamma radiation, which is harmful to tissues, and therefore is considered the most dangerous among all radionuclides in the waste. Then, the liquid will directly enter the glass transition factory of low-level waste. A separate liquid waste treatment plant will deal with waste from glass melting units and a by-product gas treatment system.

The DOE River Protection Division, which oversees the tank cleaning mission, says it is preparing to begin processing low-level waste as early as 2022. In preparation for this event, in May 2019, workers at Hanford began installing two high liquid waste tanks of 145 tons each.

Last August, officials from DOE and Bechtel National inaugurated an extension to the factory processing of low-level radioactive waste for 1860 m 2 . The building houses a control center and an operations center where workers will run processes and trials.

At a ribbon-cutting ceremony, Valery McCain, project director of the Vit factory, said: “We are approaching the start of the production of glass from low-level waste.”

No one knows when high-level waste will begin to glass in Hanford. DOE says that the technical problems that have delayed construction have been largely resolved, but it’s “not exactly accurate” when exactly the pre-treatment and glass transition workshops for high-level waste will be completed and launched. It all depends on many variables, including government funding, contractor efficiency, and the speed of technological progress. In September, the ministry warned Washington officials that they were “seriously" at risk of disrupting the deadline for high-level waste to be processed by 2033, and fully launching the factory by 2036. The deadlines are set by agreements between DOE, Washington State and other interested parties.

In the meantime, DOE is exploring alternative methods for treating part of the waste, including filling the tanks with a mortar such as cement to immobilize the waste on the spot. Officials have already considered such a strategy, but in the end they decided that glass transition would be the safest and most guaranteed method.

3. The project is under development



The $ 16.8 billion Hanford Whit factory is supposed to separate and process 212 million liters of radioactive waste. It has been built since 2002, and so far it has not begun to process any waste.


The smelters will heat low-level waste, silicon and other glass-forming substances to 1150 ° C.


The low-level waste glass transition facility will process around 90% of Hanford's waste.

Regulators and activists are annoyed by the need to return to the “glass versus cement” dispute, especially considering how much more needs to be done to build a vit factory. “It’s not easy for people to feel like they are banging their heads against the wall and aren’t able to achieve their goals,” said Alex Smith, Washington State Department of Environment's Nuclear Waste Management Program Manager.

The fact that most people working today at a construction site will not see the final results of the complex is mixed with a feeling of inertia. Today's 40-year-old in 2078, when the cleaning work is due to be completed, will be 100 years old.

“It's easy to say: What difference does it make? When the consequences of this decision begin, you will not be here, ”Smith adds. “For our employees, for DOE employees, and for people who have long worked at Hanford, this is a serious problem.”

To make people aware of the mission of the complex, the Department of Smith is more actively communicating with the community through social networks and lectures in schools. She says public understanding of the situation is key to ensuring uninterrupted funding from lawmakers, even if most US taxpayers have never heard of this project. Waste can be stored in Washington State, but it is the result of the actions of the federal government, which has embarked on the protection of the entire country through the production of nuclear weapons.

“We think this is a national purge,” agrees Susan Lekband, chairman of the Hanford panel of experts. The commission, which advises regulators and the ministry, includes local experts, current and former Hanford employees, representatives of neighboring Oregon, and members of three tribal boards: the Nez Pierce tribe, the Yakama nation, and the United Umatilla Indian Reservation tribes.

Lekband admits that people outside of Washington do not always share the views of the commission. “They have their own problems,” she says. “I understand them.” Funding is not infinite. ” She is worried about the growing desire to promote “faster and cheaper” schemes for the implementation of the cleaning mission, instead of a “quality and long-term” approach.

John vienna, a materials scientist from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, gives me a shiny rectangular piece of glass. Rusty red-orange stripes are, he said, iron, which is full of Hanford's high-level waste. The Viennese team analyzes a huge amount of materials to understand how they behave inside the glass. In the laboratory, sections of metal canisters show something like a glass obsidian containing substances that emulate highly active waste. Pieces of green emerald glass contain emulators of low activity substances.

Vienne explains that the pollutants do not splash inside the glass, like beer in a bottle. They become part of the “bottle” itself, forming atomic bonds with the glass, which will remain until the glass dissolves - which is not expected in the next million years, he said. And by then, unpleasant radionuclides will have already decayed to relatively harmless levels.


John Vienne, a researcher at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, is holding a radioactive mixture of water and chemicals emulating highly active waste.


Chemical Samples

The treatment of both types of waste is challenging, for each their own. High-level waste contains a lot of “cold substances”, such as aluminum, used at the less efficient stages of plutonium production, and they are not easily dissolved in glass. Low-level waste is mainly composed of sodium salts, which reduce the strength of glass. In the formulas of glass, these difficulties must be taken into account.

Scientists from the extensive PNNL campus have been working on glass transition for over half a century. In the 1970s, the laboratory developed this technology for ceramic smelters in the very center of the high-level and low-level waste processing workshops. In other places in the USA, as well as in some factories in Japan and Europe, this technology was used for the glass transition of local nuclear waste. Glass transition began in 1996 at the enterpriseThe Savannah River in South Carolina is another plutonium factory that now houses a disposal facility with 133 million liters of liquid radioactive waste. So far, less than half of the waste has been processed there. At a West Valley project near Buffalo, NY, DOE vitrified all 2.3 million liters of waste before demolishing the facility.

Compared to Hanford, there was less waste, and they were much more uniform. At West Valley, scientists have developed over the years one common formula that could be used to treat all waste, says Vienna, who worked on this project and several others. Given the enormous volume and complexity of Hanford's 212 million liters of waste, experts have to take different approaches.

Researchers at PNNL are creating computational models based on real tank waste, similar chemical emulators, and lab tests. In clean roomsthey study how glass samples are affected by extremely low and high temperatures, as well as water, in order to ensure that the glass breaks up slowly enough to wait out the radioactive hazard. To understand how glass is affected by the passage of time, they studied the structure of ancient glass, including pieces of Icelandic glass basalt from 2 to 4 million years old, as well as a bowl of 1800 years ago, found at a shipwreck in the Adriatic Sea. All in order that when the vit-factory starts work, experts can adjust glass compositions on the fly right before the mixture of substances gets into the smelters. The Viennese team is responsible for modeling, which will help the Hanford complex double the amount of waste placed in glass logs.

“Part of our team’s work is exploring how much we can push the boundaries of what is possible,” said Sharmain Lonergan , a materials scientist at PNNL. “This process helps reduce the processing time for all waste. Also, we can manage to reduce the cost, terms, labor costs, resources and the number of workshops. ”

However, the watch is ticking, and an atmosphere of uncertainty still hangs over the vit factory. DOE is inclined to change the classification of part of the nuclear waste to a less hazardous one, which would dispense with the glass transition of part of the waste stored in Hanford's tanks,

In particular, in June 2019, the ministry said it would change the interpretation of the definition of “high level radioactive waste” for the burial grounds in Hanford, Savannah River, and Idaho National Laboratory. Traditionally, all by-products released during the reprocessing of highly radioactive nuclear fuel are also considered extremely dangerous, and should be buried in deep geological repositories. All Hanford Waste (prior to pretreatment) falls into this category. The ministry wants to separate the waste into categories not on the basis of their origin, but on the basis of their chemical composition.

According to the revised definition of waste from fuel processing, it will be possible to consider “low-level radioactive waste” if the level of concentration of radioactivity in them is sufficiently low. For example, for cesium-137 this threshold will be 4600 Ci (1.7 × 10 14 Bq) per cubic meter.

According to the new interpretation, low-level waste does not have to go through the Hanford complex pre-treatment and glass transition workshops. Partially, they can be turned into a liquid solution and taken to a private repository in Texas. In other cases, Hanford workers will be able to pour this solution directly into the tanks, as was done with the seven underground tanks in the Savannah River.

Officials and other proponents of this strategy say that these steps could drastically reduce the time and cost of the Hanford complex waste treatment. PNNL and five other national laboratories have actively advocated for a new interpretation because of its technical advantages.

Paul M. Dubbar , deputy energy secretary for science, told reporters that the ministry "will analyze each waste stream and process it in accordance with the standards of the nuclear regulatory commission, so as to get rid of low-level waste without endangering the public." He said that every tank that falls under the definition of low-level waste will be subjected to environmental research according to the law on national environmental policy.

Critics of the approach, including Washington Governor Jay Insley and the State Department of the Environment, say the re-classification would jeopardize environmental safety and give DOE sole control over the clean-up mission. In a letter to DOE, the leaders of the Yakama nation expressed their fears that these changes would lead to even greater pollution of the area and to "lower cleaning standards."

This discussion clearly shows what constant calculations officials, regulators, activists and citizens must face when faced with Hanford's toxic legacy. Changes in policies aimed at speeding up cleaning should be evaluated in terms of the safety and well-being of people who still have tens or thousands of years left before their birth. Waste treatment methods are viewed through the prism of limited and often declining congressional funding. Scientific results do not exist in a vacuum - they are interpreted according to political motivation, public opinion and business interests.

Lekband, chairman of the Hanford panel of experts, says it's important to look at things in the long run. “Our mantra is to get the best cleaning possible. “All for the sake of the public, for the people who pay for it, who will drink water, breathe air, eat vegetables throughout the Pacific Northwest, and throughout the country,” says Lekband. “This needs to be done not only for us, but also for future generations.”

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