DOE awards contract for legacy waste plant design

12 May 2015

Merrick & Company is to design equipment for handling and treating transuranic materials for a sludge treatment facility at the US Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) under a project awarded to a consortium led by CH2M Hill.

Oak_Ridge_TWPC_(DOE)_460
The sludge processing facility will be adjacent to ORNL's existing Transuranic Waste Processing Center (Image: US Department of Energy)


The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) awarded a $1.5 million architect-engineer contract to CH2M Hill for the Sludge Processing Facility Buildouts Project at ORNL's Transuranic Waste Processing Center (TWPC) on 2 April. Merrick has now announced it will provide its specialized expertise as a partner to CH2M Hill.

The contract awarded to CH2M Hill, with partners Merrick and Navarro Inc, covers the final design of a mock test facility to prove on a large scale the technology that will be used to treat and process the sludge. The design of the facility is to be completed by the end of this year.

A second contract will cover the construction and operation of the facility and a third contract will cover the construction of the final sludge processing facility. Both are options under the contract signed with CH2M Hill, and will be authorized in due course by the Department of Energy. The final facility is expected to begin operations around the mid-2020s.

ORNL was established in 1943 and its inventory of transuranic (TRU) wastes comes from past operations at the site. TRU contains manmade elements heavier than uranium and generally includes objects and materials such as clothing, tools, soil, and other debris that has been associated with the manipulation of fissionable material. The TWPC, built in 2003, is currently processing solid and liquid TRU waste from operations in the 1950s and 1960s.

The waste currently being processed at the TWPC comprises contact-handled waste, which has lower radioactivity and can be manually sorted and repackaged by workers; and remote-handled waste, which has higher radioactivity and is processed in hot cells by employee-controlled manipulators.

OREM's Mike Koentop told World Nuclear News that 97% of the contact-handled waste and in excess of 80% of the remote-handled waste has now been treated. Processing of those waste streams is expected to be completed around 2018.

This leaves some 2000 cubic metres of TRU sludges, currently stored in tanks adjacent to the TWPC, to be treated.

Researched and written
by World Nuclear News