A stainless steel tank that will help resolve mixing issues for radioactive waste at the Hanford vitrification plant arrived recently in Richland, Washington. Manufactured by Greenberry Industrial in Vancouver, Washington and Corvallis, Oregon, and barged up the Columbia River from Vancouver, the tank is 35 feet high and 16 feet in diameter, with a volume of 22,000 gallons.
Keeping high-level radioactive waste well-mixed as it is processed within the vitrification plant is one of the technical issues that has caused construction to be halted since 2012 on the plants largest facility, the Pre-treatment Facility.
The 65-ton tank that just arrived is a full-scale prototype of several tanks planned for the vitrification plant, which is being built by Bechtel National to turn up to 56 million gallons of radioactive waste into a solid glass form for disposal.