Crews with the Idaho National Laboratory Site’s IWTU replace filter bundles inside the unit’s process gas filter. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced yesterday that waste processing operations have resumed at the Integrated Waste Treatment Unit (IWTU) at the Idaho National Laboratory Site. The resumption of operations follows the completion of two maintenance campaigns at the radioactive liquid waste treatment facility.
TMI-2 Community Advisory Panel board chair Dave Allard at the panel’s September meeting.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) expressed its confidence in the decommissioning work taking place at the damaged Three Mile Island Unit 2 during a recent meeting of the TMI-2 Community Advisory Panel (CAP). “We cannot be more pleased with the progress being made,” said Dwight Shearer, director of the DEP, during the meeting, held on September 13 in Middleton, Pa.
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.
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.
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.”
Remote equipment is used to remove components from the Garigliano reactor vessel. (Photo: Sogin)
Sogin (Società Gestione Impianti Nucleari), the state-owned company responsible for the decommissioning of Italy’s nuclear plants and the management of radioactive waste, announced on July 30 that it has completed the first phase of dismantling Garigliano nuclear power plant’s reactor vessel with the removal of contaminated metal components from the deflector.
The Atlas railcar carries a simulated shipment of spent nuclear fuel during testing in September 2023. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy has issued a request for information to gather input on its proposed package performance demonstration, which is intended to demonstrate the robustness of spent nuclear fuel transportation casks in hypothetical accident conditions. By simulating severe accident scenarios, the DOE said it intends to show to the public and stakeholders the safety and reliability of transporting SNF by rail, heavy-haul truck, and barge.
The original 1950s-era condenser is lifted out of the GPE system by a 100-ton crane at SRS's H Canyon chemical separations facility. (Photo: DOE)
Workers at the Savannah River Site have recently completed the replacement of a piece of equipment that the Department of Energy said in a July 31 press release is “essential for operations in the site’s H Canyon chemical separations capable facility.”
A June 2024 photo shows solid waste inside the single-shell Tank A-101 at the Hanford Site’s A Tank Farm. (Photo: DOE)
Work crews have started retrieval of radioactive and chemical waste from a third set of underground storage tanks at the Hanford Site, according to the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management. Contractor Washington River Protection Solutions (WRPS) is retrieving and transferring more than 325,000 gallons of waste from the single-shell Tank A-101 at the site's A Tank Farm. The waste is being sent to a newer double-shell tank for continued safe storage.
Retrieval activities began one month after workers emptied the site’s 21st single-shell tank. Waste removed from the 21 tanks totals about 3 million gallons.
Locations of DOE-EM cleanup sites. (Map: GAO)
Despite efforts to increase hiring, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management continues to be understaffed, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. The GAO found that, at the end of fiscal year 2023, DOE-EM had 263 vacant positions across its headquarters, cleanup sites, and EM Consolidated Business Center—a vacancy rate of 17 percent. The office is responsible for the cleanup of the environmental legacy waste resulting from decades of nuclear weapons production and government-sponsored nuclear energy research.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, which provides safety oversight of Department of Energy sites, is holding a 
