Hanford workers recently transferred three containers of nonradioactive test glass from the site’s WTP to the nearby Integrated Disposal Facility. (Photos: DOE)
According to the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management, two contractors at its Hanford Site in Washington state have finished a first-time relay of test glass as the site prepares to vitrify—or immobilize in glass—millions of gallons of radioactive and chemical waste from its large underground tanks.
Video: Watch an “instant replay” of the test glass relay here.
Radioactive decontamination waste is held in temporary storage in Iitate Village, Fukushima Prefecture, in 2019. (Photo: O. Evrard, J. P. Laceby, A. Nakao/Wikimedia Commons)
The International Atomic Energy Agency has found that Japan’s planned approach for recycling and disposing of soil and radioactive waste from decontamination activities after the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident is consistent with the agency’s safety standards.
Work begins on the TBI demonstration at the Hanford Site, during which 2,000 gallons of low-activity waste will be treated and shipped off-site for disposal. (Photo: DOE)
The Energy Communities Alliance (ECA), which advocates for communities adjacent to or impacted by Department of Energy sites, is asking the department to conduct an independent analysis evaluating the impacts of delaying the implementation of its statutory interpretation of high-level radioactive waste, which holds that some waste from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel may be classified as non-HLW.
SRS liquid waste contractor Savannah River Mission Completion will use drones equipped with cameras to inspect the cleaning status of waste tanks at the site. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management will begin using drones for the first time to internally inspect radioactive liquid waste tanks at the department’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Inspections were previously done using magnetic wall-crawling robots.
The site of the Onkalo deep geological repository near Eurajoki, Finland, with the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant in the background. (Photo: Posiva)
Finland’s waste management organization Posiva announced that it has begun a trial run of placing spent fuel canisters in the Onkalo geologic repository, which is located near the Olkiluoto nuclear power plant in southwestern Finland. No spent fuel will be disposed of during the trial run, which is expected to last several months.
Work crews at the INL Site prepare to move Peach Bottom fuel from a transfer cask to a storage vault. (Photo: DOE)
Crews at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory Site recently completed work to transfer baskets of spent nuclear fuel ahead of a September 30 deadline.
This series of photos shows the grouting of the K West Reactor spent fuel storage basin. Workers removed nearly 1 million gallons of contaminated water before filling the 16-foot-deep basin with about 6,500 cubic yards of grout—enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. (Images: DOE)
Workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state recently finished filling the last large concrete basin at the K Reactor Area with cement-like grout. The basin stored reactor fuel rods from historic plutonium production in the 1950s.
Construction crews work to erect the platform’s structural framework. (Photo: DOE)
Crews are making significant progress on the construction of the K-25 viewing platform at the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced on August 20. When completed next year, the elevated platform will offer a sweeping panoramic view of the massive 44-acre footprint of the K-25 Building, which once produced enriched uranium used in the weaponry that ended World War II.
The Sellafield nuclear site in Cumbria, England. (Photo: Simon Ledingham)
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), the government agency charged with cleaning up the United Kingdom’s nuclear sites, has awarded three contracts totaling £30 million (about $39 million) for research into new decommissioning techniques.
The San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station. (Photo: SCE)
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission noted two low-level regulatory violations during a recent inspection of the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, which is currently undergoing decommissioning in Southern California. The violations involved the shipment of two reactor pressurizers from San Onofre to EnergySolutions’ disposal facility in Clive, Utah.
A mock-up model at SRNL was used to demonstrate a full-scale jet cleanout system to remove undissolved material from the H Canyon electrolytic dissolver. (Photo: DOE)
A collaboration between Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS) and Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) is making progress toward processing non-aluminum spent nuclear fuel (NASNF) as part of the site’s accelerated basin de-inventory mission. SRNL is the managing and operating contractor at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
The D Area Groundwater Treatability Study project team assesses artesian flow into injection well at the Savannah River Site. (Photo: SRNS)
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions (SRNS), the management and operations contractor for the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site, announced that it has injected more than 100 million gallons of clean artesian well water to neutralize shallow groundwater contamination underneath 33 acres of a former coal storage yard and the associated runoff basin at the site in South Carolina. According to Ashley Shull, senior scientist for the project, “100 million gallons is nine times more water than [is] contained in the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta.”
The OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s William Magwood addresses the plenary audience of the 2024 Waste Management Conference in Phoenix. (Photo: WM Symposia)
Waste Management Symposia announced that the theme of next year’s Waste Management Conference (WM2025) will be “Empowering A Sustainable Future—Advanced Technologies, AI, and Workforce Development across the Nuclear Landscape.” To be held in Phoenix, Ariz., March 9–13, the conference will showcase how new technologies and the evolving digital world are transforming the global nuclear landscape, supply chains, infrastructure, and work norms.
The Paducah Site. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has issued a final request for proposals for an infrastructure support services (ISS) contract at the department’s Paducah Site in Kentucky, which is the former home of the Paducah gaseous diffusion uranium enrichment plant. DOE-EM has conducted extensive cleanup and environmental remediation activities at the site since the late 1980s.
Teams use a 20-ton overhead crane to move the lower reactor vessel of the Oak Ridge Research Reactor into a cask for eventual shipment and disposal. (Photo: DOE)
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which provides safety oversight of Department of Energy sites, is holding a