15 October 2009

Hanford's vit plant reaches halfway mark

After years of delays, $8 billion dollars over budget and more delays planned the Vitrification or Waste Treatment Plant (WTP)there has been some progress - the Plant is halfway complete.

It must be said this is still not a proven technology - mixing glass with nuclear wastes to create glass rods - but the hope is it will keep the wastes in a solid/non-fluid state to be stored in long-term underground location.

This 60 minutes video "Lethal and Leaking" from a few years ago shows the complications of the Vitrification Plant. It has has some fairly alarming parts, including the architects do not design more than 50% of the plant when the construction begins - it continually changes and morphs.

6 comments:

  1. whew! 50%!! I wonder if they'll finish the plant for its new "hot-start" date of 2019. Or if vitrification will even work...

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  2. Some progress is not enough. This is scary!!

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  3. your research is outdated and uneducated.

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  4. We're wondering what 50% complete actually means. Does it mean that they've spent 50% of the budget, that 50% of the scheduled time for building has passed, that 50% of it is engineered? Is the 50% some sort of average of the percentage built and the percentage engineered? What does this really mean?

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  5. This is a good step toward a cleaner work environment for the clean-up workers at Hanford. But 50% isn't nearly enough for how long these plans have been in effect. And this for sure isn't the all-cure solution to Hanford's radioactive waste problem; it's "assumed" that the radioactivity in glass form will dissipate over time, but how long? There seems to be a lot of talk about projected plans and dates but without appropriate actions to make it happen, progress is minimal.

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