Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) consists of one VPP Site and is currently a Merit Site since November of 2010.

CY 2011

Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) is a recognized DOE VPP MERIT site organization.  WRPS submitted an application in October 2010, and was assessed by a DOE Headquarters led team in November 2010.

The Hanford Site is located in the southeastern portion of Washington State, north of the City of Richland.  The Hanford Site was built during World War II to fabricate nuclear fuel, irradiate the nuclear fuel in production reactors, and chemically separate and recover plutonium for use in nuclear weapons. Several other valuable isotopes were also recovered.

Hanford produced plutonium for nuclear weapons for 45 years, leaving a legacy of 56 million gallons of deadly radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks.  The oldest of these tanks went into service during World War II; the newest tanks were built during the Reagan Administration.  As many as 67 of the tanks have leaked high-level radioactive waste into the soil surrounding the tanks.

Hanford’s high-level radioactive waste contains many isotopes that are soluble in water, such as cesium, strontium, technetium 99 and tritium. Once this material is the groundwater, it can get to the Columbia River and send radioactive contamination downstream.
The Department of Energy and its Tank Operations Contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, put extraordinary effort into safely managing the tank waste.  For fiscal 2012, $445 million will be spent on monitoring the tanks for leaks, adding chemicals to control corrosion of the steel tank walls, assessing the integrity of the tanks, characterizing the radioactive and chemical composition of the waste and retrieving waste from single-shell tanks and transferring it to newer and safer double-shell tanks.

The waste in the most vulnerable tanks – the old single-shell tanks – was stabilized in 2004 by pumping most of the water from the waste.  The waste wasn’t removed; it was thickened so it couldn’t flow out of a breached tank as easily.

All of these efforts are focused on reducing the risk posed by the tank waste; not eliminating the risk.  The solution to the tank waste problem is immobilizing the tank waste in the Waste Treatment Plant. Using a process known as vitrification, the waste is turned into a sturdy glass that keeps it isolated from the environment for thousands of years while its radioactivity slowly decays.

The WRPS organization includes the following work scope:

Single-Shell Tank Waste Retrieval. With the design life of the single-shell tanks long past and the need to continue storing waste in the tanks for many more years until the waste can be transferred to safer double-shell tanks, it is essential that the integrity of the tanks be maintained.  More than 60 of the single-shell tanks have leaked in the past and all 149 single-shell tanks are constantly monitored for leaks and structural problems.

Removing waste from Hanford’s single-shell tanks is an incredible challenge.  The high-level radioactive waste is complex and takes many forms, from hard saltcake, soft sludges and, in some tanks, a bottom layer of hard, insoluble material.  Access to the tanks is limited to small pipes, called risers, that extend from the inside of the tanks to above ground and the tanks themselves are covered with 10 feet of soil.  All work conducted inside the tanks must be done remotely.

To remove the waste from the tanks, several tools and techniques have been developed to break up the waste and mix it into slurry that can be pumped.  Water is sprayed into tanks to dissolve the saltcake and mobilize the sludges.  High-pressure jets of water are used to break up the hardened waste at bottom of tanks.  Chemicals are added to dissolve some types of waste and highly radioactive isotopes, such as cesium-137, are selectively removed from the waste.

The Tri-Party Agreement requires that 99 percent of the waste inside the tanks be removed.  Currently, retrieval work is concentrated in C Farm.  Consent-decree milestone calls for all 16 single-shell tanks in C Farm to be emptied by the end of 2014 and the farm closed in 2016.  Seven tanks are empty and the waste from another has been removed, but the tank has not been certified as empty by the regulators.  Retrieval efforts are under way on three more tanks in C Farm.