[en] Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) from the Oregon State University (OSU) TRIGA(reg_sign) Reactor is currently being stored in thirteen 55-gallon drums at the Hanford Site's low-level burial grounds. This fuel is soon to be retrieved from buried storage and packaged into new containers (overpacks) for interim storage at the Hanford Interim Storage Area (ISA). One of the key activities associated with this effort is final closure of the overpack by welding. The OSU fuel is placed into an overpack, a head inserted into the overpack top, and welded closed. Weld quality, for typical welded fabrication, is established through post-weld testing and nondestructive examination (NDE); however, in this case, once the SNF is placed into the overpack, routine testing and NDE are not feasible. An alternate approach is to develop and qualify the welding process/parameters, demonstrate beforehand that they produce the desired weld quality, and then verify parameter compliance during production welding. Fluor engineers have developed a Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW) technique and parameters, demonstrating that weld quality requirements for closure of packaged SNF overpacks are met, using this alternate approach. The following reviews the activities performed for this development and qualification effort

[en] A long and intense effort to stabilize and repackage nearly 18 metric tons (MT) of plutonium-bearing leftovers from defense production and nuclear experiments concluded successfully in February, bringing universal congratulations to the Department of Energy's Hanford Site in southeast Washington State. The victorious stabilization and packaging endeavor at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP), managed and operated by prime contractor Fluor Hanford, Inc., finished ahead of all milestones in Hanford's cleanup agreement with regulators, and before deadlines set by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), a part of the federal Executive Branch that oversees special nuclear materials. The PFP stabilization and packaging project also completed under budget for its four-year tenure, and has been nominated for a DOE Secretarial Award. It won the Project of the Year Award in the local chapter competition of the Project Management Institute, and is being considered for awards at the regional and national level

[en] Removing the largest collection of radioactive materials bordering the Columbia River at the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Hanford Site in southeast Washington state was successfully completed on a glorious autumn morning in 2004. The Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) Project, managed for DOE by prime contractor Fluor Hanford, removed more than 2,300 tons (2,100 metric tons [MT]) of irradiated uranium fuel--just over 4.65-million pounds--from a historic reactor area along the river's shore, called the ''Hanford Reach.'' The Project also dried the fuel and placed all of it in safe, dry, interim storage in central Hanford, nine miles from the Columbia and hundreds of feet above the groundwater table, effectively neutralizing the risks formerly posed by the decaying fuel. Removing the nearly 105,000 irradiated, solid metal uranium fuel assemblies--stored for decades underwater in the aging K Basins--marked a cornerstone event in Hanford's long farewell to arms. It was the third major triumph in a ''trifecta'' year at the old site, during which a Fluor Hanford-managed project completed stabilizing and safely packaging nearly 20 tons of plutonium-bearing materials, and another project finished pumping all liquids out of degrading, underground waste tanks. All three successful projects give traction to the vision and promise of DOE's Richland Operations Office (RL), to move wastes and special nuclear material away from the river and into Hanford's Central plateau

[en] The large land area in the center of the vast Department of Energy (DOE) Hanford Site in southeast Washington State is known as 'the plateau'--aptly named because its surface elevations are 250-300 feet above the groundwater table. By contrast, areas on the 585-square mile Site that border the Columbia River sit just 30-80 feet above the water table. The Central Plateau, which covers an ellipse of approximately 70 square miles, contains Hanford's radiochemical reprocessing areas--the 200 East and 200 West Areas--and includes the most highly radioactive waste and contaminated facilities on the Site. Five 'canyons' where chemical processes were used to separate out plutonium (Pu), 884 identified soil waste sites (including approximately 50 miles of solid waste burial trenches), more than 900 structures, and all of Hanford's liquid waste storage tanks reside in the Central Plateau. (Notes: Canyons is a nickname given by Hanford workers to the chemical reprocessing facilities. The 177, underground waste tanks at Hanford comprise a separate work scope and are not under Fluor's management). Fluor Hanford, a DOE prime cleanup contractor at the Site for the past 12 years, has moved aggressively to investigate Central Plateau waste sites in the last few years, digging more than 500 boreholes, test pits, direct soil 'pushes' or drive points; logging geophysical data sets; and performing electrical-resistivity scans (a non-intrusive technique that maps patterns of sub-surface soil conductivity). The goal is to identify areas of contamination areas in soil and solid waste sites, so that cost-effective and appropriate decisions on remediation can be made. In 2007, Fluor developed a new work plan for DOE that added 238 soil waste-site characterization activities in the Central Plateau during fiscal years (FYs) 2007-2010. This number represents a 50 percent increase over similar work previously done in central Hanford. Work Plans are among the required steps in the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) cleanup process. The CERCLA process is used to oversee the investigation, decision-making and remediation of 'past practices' (historical) sites, as opposed to sites in active use. For the first several years of Hanford's cleanup work, everyone concerned--the Department, contractors, regulatory agencies, stakeholders and Indian nations and tribes--focused efforts on the rivershore. The magnificent Columbia River--eighth largest in the world--flows through and by the Hanford Site for 52 miles. Two million people live downstream from Hanford along the Columbia before it empties into the Pacific Ocean. Further, the part of the river known as the 'Hanford Reach' is a prime habitat for salmon, steelhead, sturgeon and other species of fish. In fact, it provides a spawning ground to more salmon than any other stretch of river in the United States outside of Alaska. For these reasons, protecting the Columbia by cleaning up waste directly along its shoreline was an early priority in Hanford's Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order (or Tri-Party Agreement) signed in 1989 among the DOE, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Washington State to govern cleanup. However, Tri-Party Agreement signatories and others concerned with Hanford and the Columbia River, knew that the waste located in, and beneath, the Central Plateau could also pose dangers to the waterway. While the waste in central Hanford might move more slowly, and pose fewer immediate threats, it would have to be dealt with as cleanup progressed

[en] Retrieving ''suspect'' transuranic (TRU) waste from the Hanford Site's low-level waste burial grounds is a tall order, due to conditions that have changed as the work progresses. Project personnel developed several new methods for handling the waste that other retrieval operations may find useful. The Waste Retrieval Project is operated by Fluor Hanford, a prime contractor for the U.S. Department of Energy's Richland Operations Office since 1996

[en] The Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Department of Energy's Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State began operations in 1949 to process plutonium and plutonium products. Its primary mission was to produce plutonium metal, fabricate weapons parts, and stabilize reactive materials. These operations, and subsequent activities, were performed in production lines, consisting primarily of hundreds of gloveboxes. Over the years, these gloveboxes and attendant processes have been continuously modified. The plant is currently inactive and Fluor Hanford has been tasked with cleaning out contaminated equipment and gloveboxes from the facility so it can be demolished in the near future. Approximately 100 gloveboxes at PFP have been cleaned out in the past four years and about 90 gloveboxes remain to be cleaned out. Because specific commitment dates for this work have been established with the State of Washington and other entities, it is important to adopt work practices that increase the safety and speed of this effort. The most recent work practice to be adopted by Fluor Hanford D and D workers is the use of 3-D models to make the process of cleaning out the radioactive gloveboxes more efficient. The use of 3-D models has significantly improved the work-planning process by giving workers a clear image of glovebox construction and composition, which in turn is used to determine cleanout methods and work sequences. The 3-D visual products also enhance safety by enabling workers to more easily identify hazards and implement controls. Further, the ability to identify and target the removal of radiological material early in the D and D process provides substantial dose reduction for the workers

[en] More than 200 million liters (53 million gallons) of highly radioactive and hazardous waste is stored at the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State. The DOE's Hanford Site River Protection Project (RPP) mission includes tank waste retrieval, waste treatment, waste disposal, and tank farms closure activities. This mission will largely be accomplished by the construction and operation of three large treatment facilities at the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP): (1) a Pretreatment (PT) facility intended to separate the tank waste into High Level Waste (HLW) and Low Activity Waste (LAW); (2) a HLW vitrification facility intended to immobilize the HLW for disposal at a geologic repository in Yucca Mountain; and (3) a LAW vitrification facility intended to immobilize the LAW for shallow land burial at Hanford's Integrated Disposal Facility (IDF). The LAW facility is on target to be completed in 2014, five years prior to the completion of the rest of the WTP. In order to gain experience in the operation of the LAW vitrification facility, accelerate retrieval from single-shell tank (SST) farms, and hasten the completion of the LAW immobilization, it has been proposed to begin treatment of the low-activity waste five years before the conclusion of the WTP's construction. A challenge with this strategy is that the stream containing the LAW vitrification facility off-gas treatment condensates will not have the option of recycling back to pretreatment, and will instead be treated by the Hanford Effluent Treatment Facility (ETF). Here the off-gas condensates will be immobilized into a secondary waste form; ETF solid waste

[en] Transportation (DOT) and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to provide for the protection of the public and the environment; historically these regulations have proven quite sufficient. Even so, when the Department of Energy (DOE) makes radioactive materials shipments, that are deemed to be a major federal activity, regulations under the National Environmental Policy Act require that public input on safety issues be sought. This requirement leads to interactions with State, Tribal and local stakeholders that often result in the imposition of extra-regulatory requirements--requirements beyond those prescribed by DOT and NRC regulations. Unfortunately, these additional requirements virtually always increase costs and delay schedules, and usually do so without significantly increasing, and possibly even decreasing overall transportation safety. We believe that this problem arises because of efforts to achieve stakeholder consensus rather than stakeholder consent, where ''consensus'' connotes universal agreement with all aspects of the program, while ''consent'', as used here, is simple agreement with the overall course of action. Gaining consensus entails extensive negotiations because all aspects and requirements of the project must be agreed to by each stakeholder. Gaining consent, on the other hand, requires only that stakeholders be satisfied that the project, as planned, provides adequately for their safety needs. This article addresses the issue of consent versus consensus and proposes a systematic, decision science process for reaching consent. Key steps in this proposed process are early identification and involvement of stakeholders, compilation of their concerns, perceptions, needs, causes, and translation of that information into an appropriate set of ''derived requirements''. These derived requirements, along with already-established DOT and NRC regulatory requirements, form the necessary and sufficient conditions for safe transportation and for obtaining stakeholder consent

[en] Solid phase physical and chemical characterization methods have been used in an ongoing study of residual wastes from several single-shell underground waste tanks at the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Site in southeastern Washington State. Because these wastes are highly-radioactive dispersible powders and are chemically-complex assemblages of crystalline and amorphous solids that contain contaminants as discrete phases and/or co-precipitated within oxide phases, their detailed characterization offers an extraordinary technical challenge. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscopy/energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (SEM/EDS) are the two principal methods used, along with a limited series of analyses by synchrotron-based methods, to characterize solid phases and their contaminant associations in these wastes.

[en] This article highlights recent fundamental scientific research on subsurface radionuclide migration.