Background: This is DOE-EM’s fourth update to its 10-year strategic vision document and comes as the office continues to pivot from large-scale cleanup projects to preparing sites for community reuse and reindustrialization. According to DOE-EM, this current update was developed through outreach and with feedback from regulators, tribal nations, DOE-EM advisory boards, local communities, and other partners.
The office is targeting four of its sites for completion of legacy cleanup activities in the coming decade: the Moab Uranium Mill Tailings Remedial Action Project in Utah; the EM-Nevada mission at the Nevada National Security Site; the Sandia National Laboratories site in New Mexico; and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory site in California.
With the announcement last year that it had completed cleanup work at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York, DOE-EM currently has 15 active sites where cleanup work is ongoing.
The goals: The following points are included in DOE-EM’s vision for its cleanup sites over the next decade:
- Treating and stabilizing radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site through vitrification through the Direct-Feed Low-Activity Waste system, ramping up the site’s high-level tank waste capabilities, completing significant risk-reduction activities such as transferring cesium and strontium capsules to dry storage, and placing the last of the former production reactors, K West Reactor, into interim safe storage.
- Emptying and closing up to 22 of 51 underground waste tanks at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and completing disposal of remaining legacy transuranic waste.
- Completing the new safety significant confinement ventilation system, utility shaft, and other key infrastructure upgrades at New Mexico’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant.
- Completing disposal of uranium-233 at Oak Ridge, as well as completing construction of the site’s new mercury treatment facility.
- Completing treatment of remaining liquid sodium-bearing waste at the Idaho National Laboratory Site.
- Finalizing and implementing long-term treatment approaches for contaminated groundwater at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
- Demolishing two former uranium enrichment process buildings at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio.
- Completing deactivation activities at the C-333 former uranium enrichment process building and beginning fieldwork for the C-400 remedial action at the Paducah Site in Kentucky.
- Completing the first phase of demolition activities at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York.
- Initiating soil remediation and final groundwater treatment approaches at the former Energy Technology Engineering Center site in California.
