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Hanford begins removing waste from 24th single-shell tank
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said crews at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., have started retrieving radioactive waste from Tank A-106, a 1-million-gallon underground storage tank built in the 1950s.
Tank A-106 will be the 24th single-shell tank that crews have cleaned out at Hanford, which is home to 177 underground waste storage tanks: 149 single-shell tanks and 28 double-shell tanks. Ranging from 55,000 gallons to more than 1 million gallons in capacity, the tanks hold around 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste resulting from plutonium production at the site.
C. Erika Moss, Ondrej Chvala, Donny Hartanto, John P. Carter
Nuclear Technology | Volume 212 | Number 2 | February 2026 | Pages 277-293
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2025.2464430
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Public perception of nuclear power continues to be hindered by the challenge of used fuel management. Advanced Generation IV reactor designs such as the Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) could potentially serve a significant role in high-level waste (HLW) minimization and management, with innovative fuel cycles warranting further study as commercial interest in these reactors continues to increase. In particular, the Sourdough refueling and waste management strategy has recently been proposed as a promising alternative fuel cycle for thermal spectrum MSRs operating with low-enriched uranium (LEU). The Sourdough concept has demonstrated promise in recent research as an efficient framework for minimizing and managing HLW in addition to supporting flexible nuclear fleet growth and grid decarbonization. In this work, the Sourdough refueling strategy will be implemented into a novel thermal spectrum LEU-fueled MSR design. The SCALE/KENO-VI Criticality Safety Analysis Sequence (CSAS6) will be used to study reactivity feedback and neutron flux behavior, while a combination of KENO-VI and TRITON will be used for implementation of the Sourdough refueling framework. Changes in reactivity resulting from different refuel enrichment levels and refuel volume additions will be examined for each depletion step with the objective of determining optimal refueling regimes for maintaining reactor safety and criticality, in addition to achieving a desired rate of fuel growth. Furthermore, the MSR model, in addition to all scripts developed for implementing and analyzing the Sourdough refueling strategy, is open source and made freely available with the intent of fostering continued growth in MSR fuel cycle research.