Waste Treatment Plant - 12508
- US DOE (United States)
The Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) will immobilize millions of gallons of Hanford's tank waste into solid glass using a proven technology called vitrification. The vitrification process will turn the waste into a stable glass form that is safe for long-term storage. Our discussion of the WTP will include a description of the ongoing design and construction of this large, complex, first-of-a-kind project. The concept for the operation of the WTP is to separate high-level and low-activity waste fractions, and immobilize those fractions in glass using vitrification. The WTP includes four major nuclear facilities and various support facilities. Waste from the Tank Farms is first pumped to the Pretreatment Facility at the WTP through an underground pipe-in-pipe system. When construction is complete, the Pretreatment Facility will be 12 stories high, 540 feet long and 215 feet wide, making it the largest of the four major nuclear facilities that compose the WTP. The total size of this facility will be more than 490,000 square feet. More than 8.2 million craft hours are required to construct this facility. Currently, the Pretreatment Facility is 51 percent complete. At the Pretreatment Facility the waste is pumped to the interior waste feed receipt vessels. Each of these four vessels is 55-feet tall and has a 375,000 gallon capacity, which makes them the largest vessels inside the Pretreatment Facility. These vessels contain a series of internal pulse-jet mixers to keep incoming waste properly mixed. The vessels are inside the black-cell areas, completely enclosed behind thick steel-laced, high strength concrete walls. The black cells are designed to be maintenance free with no moving parts. Once hot operations commence the black-cell area will be inaccessible. Surrounded by black cells, is the 'hot cell canyon'. The hot cell contains all the moving and replaceable components to remove solids and extract liquids. In this area, there is ultrafiltration equipment, cesium-ion exchange columns, evaporator boilers and recirculation pumps, and various mechanical process pumps for transferring process fluids. During the first phase of pretreatment, the waste will be concentrated using an evaporation process. Solids will be filtered out, and the remaining soluble, highly radioactive isotopes will be removed using an ion-exchange process. The high-level solids will be sent to the High-Level Waste (HLW) Vitrification Facility, and the low activity liquids will be sent to the Low-Activity Waste (LAW) Vitrification Facility for further processing. The high-level waste will be transferred via underground pipes to the HLW Facility from the Pretreatment Facility. The waste first arrives at the wet cell, which rests inside a black-cell area. The pretreated waste is transferred through shielded pipes into a series of melter preparation and feed vessels before reaching the melters. Liquids from various facility processes also return to the wet cell for interim storage before recycling back to the Pretreatment Facility. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, 1628 E. Southern Avenue, Suite 9-332, Tempe, AZ 85282 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22293723
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US-14-WM-12508; TRN: US14V1379115247
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: WM2012: Waste Management 2012 conference on improving the future in waste management, Phoenix, AZ (United States), 26 Feb - 1 Mar 2012; Other Information: Country of input: France
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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