Public Meeting – Treatment of Low-Activity Waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation

An upcoming public meeting of the Committee to Review of the Continued Analysis of Supplemental Treatment of Low-Activity Waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation will be held 26-28 April, 2022. This is the third meeting of the committee. There will be both information-gathering (open) sessions and closed (committee only) sessions.

During the information-gathering sessions, the Committee will learn about the ongoing progress of the FFRDC Team and will receive briefings from the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Government Accountability Office. In addition, major stakeholders will have the opportunity to address the committee, including the Washington State Department of Ecology, Oregon Department of Energy, Tribal Nations, Hanford Advisory Board, Hanford Communities, Energy Communities Alliance, and the Tri-City Development Council.

The DOE will provide a restricted site visit for the National Academies committee, one of the first tours of the Hanford Site since the beginning of the pandemic to highlight the headway that is being made.

The schedule for public sessions is as follows:

Tuesday April 26, 7:30 AM – 9:30 AM PST
Wednesday, April 27, 7:30 AM – 5:00 PM PST
Thursday, April 28, 7:30 AM – 11:30 AM PST

A virtual webcast of each public session will also be available. Connection details will be posted on the project website soon.

Background:

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where about two-thirds of the nation’s weapons plutonium was produced from 1944 to 1987, is the site of the largest and most complex nuclear cleanup challenge in the United States. Section 3125 of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 calls for a Federally Funded Research and Development Center (FFRDC) to develop a framework of decisions to be made among the supplemental treatment technologies, waste forms, and disposal locations for low-activity waste in the Hanford tanks. In addition, Section 3125 calls for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to provide a concurrent, independent peer review of the ongoing FFRDC analysis. This review report, the first of three to address the Congressional mandate, focuses on the technical quality and completeness of the FFRDC’s draft framework.