Hanford Department of Energy manager on tank waste, vitrification and overall clean up progress

The 56 million gallons of radioactive waste created from decades of plutonium enrichment at Hanford are stored in 177 massive, underground tanks on 18 different “farms” spread out over the 580 square miles of the nuclear reservation in Washington state. Most of the tanks are single-shelled, but 28 of them are double-shelled, which helps prevent waste from getting into the ground. Each tank holds between 55,000 and a million gallons of toxic waste.

The U.S. Department of Energy oversees the facility and is responsible for preventing the contamination of both the groundwater and the Columbia River. The DOE is also in the process of testing its multi-billion dollar vitrification plant, which is intended to bind-up the radioactive waste in glass logs to safely store it. We get a tour of the tank farm from Karthik Subramanian, who serves as chief operating officer of Washington River Protection Solutions, the tank farm operations contractor. And we sit down with Brian Vance, the Department of Energy’s top manager in charge of Hanford to hear more about tank integrity, the status of the vitrification plant and the overall clean up progress.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you from Washington State University Tri-Cities. We are here all week, in partnership with Northwest Public Broadcasting, to talk about the Hanford Site.

Fifty-six million gallons of radioactive waste created from decades of plutonium production is stored in 177 massive underground tanks spread out over 580 square miles. About a third of those tanks are known to have leaked. One of the biggest cleanup projects at Hanford, one that’s already taken more than $11 billion and decades of work, is to transfer that waste out of those tanks and turn it into a solid glass form for long-term disposal at a place known as the Vit Plant. An intermediary step in that process is to move the waste to double-walled tanks before it gets to the still not-operational plant. We got a tour of that tank farm yesterday. Karthik Subramanian was our guide. He is the chief operating officer of Washington River Protection Solutions – that’s a contractor that sort of babysits the tank farms.

A tank farm doesn’t look like much from the ground level. It actually reminded me of the roof of an office building, with a bunch of boxes and exhaust pipes on top. So I asked Subramanian to give us a sense for what was below the surface.

Karthik Subramanian: These tanks are about a million gallons in volume, and they’re about 85 ft in diameter, about 30 ft tall. And then they are buried with the top of the tank at about a 12 ft level, between 9 and 12 ft depending on where you are on the dome. So they’re buried quite a bit underground.

And then each of those tanks is completely secondary contained in another tank.

Miller: With an air gap between them, and some kind of sensors too?

Subramanian: Yes. So in the air gap, we do have temperature sensors, as well as leak detection. So if we see any of that happen, it all reads in our control room and we respond to it immediately. Whether it be just a communications issue or if there’s a real event, then we respond to that.

Miller: That’s very different from the original single-walled tanks built in the mid-40s that were supposed to last for 20 years.

Subramanian: That’s exactly right. The single-shelled tanks do not have an annular space. And so as I said, one of the important parts of our mission is to retrieve it from those tanks and put it in the double-shelled tanks. And like I said, high success in east area, two tank farms completely finished. And now we’re on to our last one in east area.

Miller: This is a kind of job where if somebody messes up at work, it could be catastrophic for a lot of people. How do you keep people focused?

Subramanian: As in any nuclear industry, there’s a lot of layers of procedural compliance to ensure that there is multiple layers of defense against any errors that would have impact. This is an old system that’s been put in place – it’s called Conduct of Operations. We have procedures that are meant to support the folks doing the work. And those procedures are constantly reviewed, evolving, and to ensure that we are procedurally compliant. So between the staff … like I said, multiple layers of defense in ensuring that any errors are not catastrophic, as you say. And in fact, we have metrics that we use that we track even small errors or small events, and so we prevent those along the way as well.

Miller: Do you lead your home life in the same way?

Subramanian: [Laughs] Yes.

Miller: The reason I asked that is that I heard that people in Richland put safety goggles on when they chop onions. When they mow their lawns, they put on boots that go up to their thighs and helmets to mow their lawn.

Subramanian: It is a culture of safety. We say it all the time, when we have safety introductions to most of our meetings, “we take safety home with us.” It could be anything from just driving, not running yellow lights, or it could be when you’re cutting the grass, wearing safety goggles. So absolutely, I take it home with me. In my mind, you behave in a way that you want other folks to behave, and that safety doesn’t stop at the fence.

Miller: But I think you can understand why there would be skepticism. After decades of secrecy, and in some cases obfuscation about mishaps, there’s a gap of trust in the public about a lot of what happens here, whether it’s DOE or contractors. Do you recognize where the skepticism or fear comes from?

Subramanian: Yeah, absolutely. And so I think that the steps we are taking there is that we need to be forward in educating the public on the work that we are doing here, as I mentioned about the technologies and the engineering work and the operations that we’re doing. We have the opportunity to go do that. In contrast to maybe 30-40 years ago when there was a secrecy, I presume.

Now, we’re taking steps, we in the department are taking steps to educate the public on the work that we’re doing. Not just the public, but all stakeholders. And so that’s where we’ll see, in my opinion, where we’ll see that trust grow.

Miller: How did you get into this line of work?

Subramanian: I started in the national lab system doing research on tank waste processing for the NNSA. I started work at Savannah River in waste processing. I think what interested me most about Hanford is just the scale.

Miller: So what scares a lot of people is what attracted you to this place, the scale of this problem? That’s why you want to be here?

Subramanian: Absolutely. What we want to do from a scale standpoint, and a nobility of the mission standpoint, those are the two things that attracted me. So if you’re an environmentalist and you want to really help the environment, nobility of mission and scale, what more can you ask for?

Miller: Are you an environmentalist?

Subramanian: I consider myself one. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.

Miller: What does it mean to you to say that you’re an environmentalist?

Subramanian: To me, personally? I think that we’ve been given this environment, and it’s our responsibility as a human race to protect it. It’s kind of that simple.

Miller: That was Karthik Subramanian. He is the chief operating officer of Washington River Protection Solutions.

A pipe goes from that tank farm that we were talking in front of to the huge vitrification plant that is intended to process the radioactive waste. That plant was the next stop on the tour we took yesterday. We saw the huge melters that’ll be used to turn liquid waste into solid but still radioactive glass. And we saw an example of the steel canisters, weighing more than 15,000 pounds when filled, that will hold that glass.

Chris Musick is the deputy director of the factory, which is just a part of what’s officially called the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant Project. Over several decades, the public was periodically told that the plant would be operational in the next few years. All of those dates have come and gone. So I asked Musick when this project will finally be operational.

Chris Musick: We have a really aggressive schedule. Right now, we’re talking to go hot in August of ‘25.

Miller: What do you mean when you say aggressive?

Musick: We have a lot to do. This is a plant, you’ve been through it, it’s very large and complicated. We’ve just got a lot of methodical steps that we want to go through. And we wanna make sure that our people and our paper and our plant is all ready to go before we go hot. We’ve been working really closely with the Department. So there’s just a lot to do between now and then. I’m not saying we’re not confident that we’ll meet the August date. I just want you to know there’s just a lot of things and steps that we need to go through and we’re making good progress every day, making history every day.

Miller: That was Chris Musick. He’s the deputy director of the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant Project, which we toured yesterday.

I’m joined now by Brian Vance. He is a manager of the Department of Energy’s Office of River Protection and Richland Operations Office. It basically means that he’s a top manager of the Hanford Site for the federal agency that is in charge of it. I should note that one of the conditions of this interview was that we provide our questions in advance. It’s not something that we’ve ever done before for a public official, but it was important enough for us to have this conversation that we said yes. Brian Vance, welcome. Thanks very much for joining us.

Brian Vance: I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you.

Miller: This site has many different radioactive compounds in a lot of different forms. Some of them can spontaneously explode, I’ve learned, if the wrong particles settle in the wrong place. It’s in water and sludge and solid forms. It’s in leaking tanks, in boiling hot pools, decommissioned nuclear subs, cocooned reactors. That’s in addition to a kind of witch’s brew of hundreds of toxic chemicals. I gave that litany just to give listeners a sense for the complexity of managing all this. How do you think about that complexity?

Vance: As we think about how we manage a broad risk portfolio, which is what we’re here to do, we work very closely with our contractor partners. We have a tremendous outreach to national laboratories. Pacific Northwest National Lab is right here with us, we have a relationship with them, Savannah River National Lab. And through the National Academy of Sciences, lots of different resources and lots of different ability to bring really smart people to our site, to evaluate the situation we’re working our way through, and help us to prioritize that work in a way that we can work on the right risk elements of the site, with the dollars we receive, trend the risk profile down as aggressive as you can, which creates the safest place for our workforce and our community.

Miller: So that’s the issue of complexity. There’s also just the mind boggling volume: 56 million gallons of radioactive waste in these underground tanks, in 18 different sites over almost 600 square miles. The size of this site alone is staggering. How do you think about the scale of this work?

Vance: Well, I think first of all, those tanks are not distributed through 580 square miles. It’s really in the central plateau area where it’s much, much smaller than that.

Miller: But there are radioactive sites sprinkled here and there, in addition to the tanks.

Vance: Correct. Really on the site proper, if you look at the Hanford Reach National Monument that goes around the site, west of the Highway 240, north of the Columbia River, there’s really no active cleanup there. But it’s really the site proper where some of those activities are. And just to clarify, we don’t have any boiling pools. The reactor compartments we receive from the Navy are defueled reactor compartments. So there’s not a risk there other than just maintaining those facilities safe. And we work with naval reactors to ensure they’re safe as well.

And then when you look at the complexity of the site, we break it into three basic product lines. One is the tank waste product line that you spent time yesterday seeing, the tank farms and the waste treatment plant, that’s a part of it. There’s also the risk reduction product line, which is facility demolition, soil remediation, groundwater treatment. And then it’s the infrastructure that underpins that entire work scope that we have to clean up the site. Because without roads, water, power, sewer, can’t clean up. All of those go into how we break the site into more reasonable chunks, and then work it from a risk priority perspective in that way.

Miller: I wanna get some clarification there because my understanding was there are still places that are so hot that they’re bubbling. You’re saying that that’s not the case?

Vance: I don’t think there’s any actual bubbling. When you say hot to someone that works in our industry, they think radiologically hot ...

Miller: I was thinking about temperature.

Vance: No, there’s no places on the site that are actually physically boiling.

Miller: What are the nightmare scenarios for you? What are the kinds of worst case scenarios that might keep you up at night?

Vance: My biggest fear – and Karthik talked a little bit about it a little bit – is the safety culture that surrounds how we do work. My biggest fear is someone getting hurt, doing the work on the site. We’re asking up to roughly 12,000 people to support the cleanup mission here. And all of those things that we have in place to keep people safe while doing this work, there’s always the very slight possibility that one of our processes, one of our procedures, one of our protocols won’t work as we anticipate it. We have a strong safety culture, which basically requires workers to stop when they’re confronted with something they don’t expect. All of those things together create my ability to sleep at night. And that really is the culture of the site and the commitment for health and safety.

Miller: Correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like what you’re saying is your biggest fear, the scale of that is about a workplace accident, as opposed to saying some kind of tunnel collapse or bigger infrastructure problem that could lead to a radiological problem that goes well past Hanford. That isn’t what you said.

Vance: I’m less worried about that than I am about the health and safety of our workforce. We have very robust programs, processes, procedures on our site to deal with the range of chemical and radiological issues that we have to clean up. Those processes are very robust, very effective. And the people that do that work are top of the line. So from that perspective, we’re managing the site to fully mitigate, or mostly mitigate, the risk of something like that – what you framed as a doomsday outcome. I think that’s an almost infinitesimal possibility on my site, based on the way we operate.

Miller: This site, for very obvious national security reasons, was born in secrecy. And the sense I get is that secrecy has been embedded in the culture for many of the decades that have followed, including when workers and the public were not alerted in timely fashions to leaks or other problems, or releases of radiation. It’s often, in the past, taken whistleblowers for the truth to come out. How do you think about the balance of secrecy and openness now?

Vance: I think openness and transparency are two of the things that I’m most proud of, that we’ve spent considerable amount of time investing in, not only with our community, but with regional stakeholders, the Tribal Nations, the national community as well. Multiple examples – we wanna talk about the successes we have on the Hanford Site, and we have a lot of successes.

But we also wanna own when we have less than successful outcomes. Like this summer, we announced a small leak from Tank T-101 and the T-Farm. From a timeliness perspective, the process that identified that tank as potentially leaking … My determination was from a conservative perspective, we’re gonna call it a leaking tank and we’re gonna communicate right away.

Miller: How do you think that would have been handled in the 1950s, or ‘60s, or ‘70s?

Vance: Different time, in a national security posture, that was very, very different. My sense – and I’m a little bit younger than that – was that the community would not have been told. Today, my commitment to our community and really a broad range of stakeholders is we’re gonna be communicating, we’re gonna tell them what’s going on the site, good, bad, indifferent. Make sure that if it’s not what we wanted it to be, if it’s less than good news, we’re gonna own it, we’re gonna be transparent about it. We’re gonna tell people what we’re doing about it and why it’s not a risk.

Miller: One of the phrases that I’ve heard about this week and that’s come out on our show is “low activity waste” and “high activity waste.” And it’s worth saying that the vitrification plant that we visited yesterday – we heard a little bit of tape from that tour – the idea is it will hopefully soon be up and running to process low activity waste. But both of these kinds of waste are radioactive. What’s the difference between them?

Vance: Well, there’s interesting definitions on how they’re described. High level waste is typically described by how it’s formed, which is spent nuclear fuel or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to drive products like plutonium. We do have the high level waste facility being constructed. In essence, what we’re doing now is finalizing the commissioning process to be able to start vitrifying low activity waste next year. And then we have a plan to drive the design of the high level waste facility to 90% complete by the end of 2027. And then transition into full construction in ‘28, to meet the consent decree milestones that came out of the host agreement with the State of Washington to start treating that part of our tank waste.

So, in 10 years, we’ll be treating both fractions of the waste. In some ways, the difference is whether it can be contact handled, which means you could be close to it, or not. High level waste is remote handled. Low activity waste that you saw is contact handled. So the radiological level is a little bit different.

Miller: What do you think is a bigger engineering challenge overall: making plutonium on an industrial scale when it had never been done before – I’m talking about the Manhattan project in 1943-1944 – or cleaning up the waste from decades of that plutonium production? And it’s worth saying, we’re gonna go on a tour of the B Reactor this afternoon and it’ll be part of tomorrow’s show.

Vance: It’s a great question. I think the new science, that was nuclear in 1943 that started the Atomic Age, [was] uniquely challenging because it had never been done before.

Miller: And they did it in 11 months or so.

Vance: They did, and their risk profile was based on war in the Pacific, war in Europe ...

Miller: When you say risk, meaning, what they were subjecting themselves to was based on what they saw as a kind of existential threat, combined with not nearly the kind of knowledge that we have today about risk?

Vance: Correct.

Miller: But, I’m talking less about risk … maybe you can’t disentangle risk from the engineering problem. But the reason I asked is because they were able to do something that had never been done by humans in about a year or so, they accomplished their goal. We are decades and decades, and billions and billions of dollars into figuring out what to do with the waste that was generated, and we’re not there yet.

Vance: Well, when you look at the focus of the time, which was on the national security mission, they were under tremendous pressure because of the world situation to produce plutonium, to preserve the nation, in many ways. And so as a new science, they made decisions based on the situation they had at the time, with the knowledge they had, not recognizing that their actions would create a much more complicated and complex cleanup in the future. And so when the national security mission drove, environmental science, environmental cleanup of the future was not a part of the calculus.

When we transition, 1989, to the cleanup mission, now we have a whole body of evidence behind us, the effects of ionizing radiation, the impacts of different chemicals and how they interact, the difference of radionuclides and how they interact. And we had to apply all that knowledge under a different safety paradigm to be able to progress the cleanup mission. It’s gonna take a while.

Miller: It’s tempting to look at the past and say “Man, we know so much more than they did. They did the best they could, but they left us with a huge mess. But now we know so much more.” That’s one way I can imagine looking at it. Another is to look at this from even further away, and take some version of humility from it and imagine what people 80 years from now will think about you. When I say “you,” I mean all of us.

Do you do that? Do you imagine how the future will view the best technology we have now, and the decisions you’re making now?

Vance: I hope as they look back in the future – however that’s defined – and they think about the cleanup mission that we’re executing at the Hanford Site, they’ll recognize that the team that is progressing the mission today learned from the past, strove to enhance our ability to safely conduct the cleanup mission, being protective of our workforce and our community, and built a team that was committed to the success of a very daunting mission and performed very well in a very complex environment. We’re striving for excellence every day. We still have a lot to learn. But I think at the end of the day, the progress we’ve made is important, is impactful, and we’re set up from a trajectory of the site perspective, I think, for a very exciting next 20 years of the cleanup mission.

Miller: About 10 years ago, hundreds of technical problems with the vitrification plant were identified. A number of them were really serious, essentially make or break issues, mission critical issues. Have all of those been worked out?

Vance: For the low activity waste facility, yes. We’re in commission, the plant’s built, we’re moving forward.

There were about 19 issues that were left for the high level waste facility and the pretreatment facility. Those issues have been addressed. But as you recognize, as you progress the design of the high level facilities – our focus now – we may find more as we go. What I’m confident in is that our team, our approach to business, those issues will be solvable, we’ll solve them and continue to progress the mission.

Miller: The vitrified, the glass form of this radioactive waste that’s low activity waste – the plan is for that to be stored on site at Hanford. But what is the plan for the high level waste when it is eventually up and running and turned into glass, now that Yucca Mountain is off the table?

Vance: For the site, we will build an interim storage facility so that we can progress the high level waste mission, vitrify the tank waste, in a facility, until such time as there’s a national repository. [It] doesn’t exist right now.

Miller: I hadn’t realized that. So you wouldn’t wait on processing the high level waste pending the approval of a long-term storage facility?

Vance: Absolutely not.

Miller: You would make it and store it here somewhere. Does it make you wonder if the temporary storage site would essentially be permanent?

Vance: Certainly. The Yucca Mountain or high level waste repository, that’s gonna be driven by political will. What our focus will be on is progressing the mission, getting the waste out of the tanks into a safer and stable configuration, and storing it until such time as the political will supports a national repository.

Miller: What [are] the estimates for how long it’ll take to process those two kinds of waste here at Hanford – the low activity and the high activity waste – from when the two plants are up and running to when that mission is complete?

Vance: We go through a process called system planning, which is an operational analysis problem. We look at various parameters. Right now, our projections show the overall site mission running until the 2070s, 2080s time frame. We’re always looking for opportunities to improve on that time horizon, but that’s the current projection.

Miller: That is the nearest scale of time here. That’s only five decades or so, compared to hundreds of thousands or millions of years, which is the half lives of these various isotopes. How has this job informed the way you think about time?

Vance: Well, that’s multidimensional, right? There’s a political time, which is four-year chunks …

Miller: Appropriations.

Vance: Well, appropriations is usually two.

Miller: Oh, you’re talking about presidential administrations.

Vance: Presidential administrations.

Miller: OK. But still, that’s not geological time. Two and four years is political time.

Vance: That’s right. As you think about the longer term, what we try to do is make sure that we’re applying the best science we know today to place the waste in the safest configuration that we can achieve, and put it in a location where it can be appropriately stored and managed, with the recognition that the mission is gonna last for decades, and then the site’s gonna be here much longer than that. There’s portions of the site that remain in federal control and perpetuity. So, we’ve got to think about those aspects of the mission and like I said, do the best we can to establish a safe, long-term solution that we have to continue to manage for quite a long time.

Miller: We’ve been talking a lot about vitrification, the glass formation part here. But there’s another technique called grouting that’s also being explored right now. The basic idea, as I understand it, is to put some low activity waste into a cement-like form, also for long-term disposal.

Officials in Oregon and Washington have expressed some concerns about a test project that could happen in the next year to transport something like 2,000 gallons. A lot if you’re thinking about waste as a general public; a tiny amount if you’re thinking about millions of gallons that are here. But the idea is to transport some of that waste through the Northwest to Texas and Utah.

My understanding is that some of that might have already been turned into a solid form, already been grouted. Maybe it would be transported as a liquid. Why transport it as a liquid, which seems more dangerous if there is, say, a train collision or a truck collision?

Vance: The Test Bed Initiative is the name of the initiative. It’s a follow-on to a three gallon test which was solidified and then sent to a licensed and regulated repository in Texas. The Test Bed Initiative is a 2,000 gallon test. We’re gonna treat the tank waste, very similar to what you saw yesterday, to remove the majority of the radiological content. The 2,000 gallons will be placed in Department of Transportation approved containers, with really very benign chemical constituent and almost no radiological content. And the plan is to transport it via truck to locations in Texas and Utah, to demonstrate the capability to do that safely.

Now, in industrial society, there’s always a need to move hazardous materials around the country. The Department of Transportation has a phenomenal safety record. And things that are transported very safely every day are far more hazardous than treated tank waste in DOT approved containers. We saw that as a very low risk approach for a very small quantity of liquid. We went through the appropriate regulatory processes, public comment, and all those aspects.

I think there’s a misconception between the Test Bed Initiative, and then the holistic agreement, which is sort of that next phase, which won’t really start till late 2028, 2029.

Miller: And that’s where potentially, if the test goes well, from your perspective, millions of gallons might be transported this way.

Vance: Well, millions of gallons will be transported. We haven’t made the determination whether we’re gonna grout out here, grout at the facility location. We’re gonna make that determination next year. But the public comment we received during holistic negotiations, in three public comment meetings and in general over the 120-day period, we’re gonna use that to inform that decision.

Miller: And just briefly, given that there’s already a low activity waste repository here, at Hanford three miles away, why not just have there be a permanent repository for grouted waste as well?

Vance: Well, the agreement with the state relative to keeping low activity waste in the state of Washington was it had to be in a vitrified form.

Miller: In other words, you don’t have authorization to have it here in grouted form.

Vance: That’s correct.

Miller: Is that because of the water table?

Vance: There are a lots of different views on the rationale for that. I wouldn’t want to speak for the state of Washington. It’s really their concern more than ours. We think from a geological perspective we could keep the waste here, but we don’t have state authority, and we want to partner with the state to continue to progress the mission.

Miller: Brian Vance, thanks very much.

Vance: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

Miller: Brian Vance is the Department of Energy’s Hanford manager.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.