The primary goal of this work is to accelerate the overall cleanup mission schedule at the Hanford Site by enabling Direct Feed High-Level Waste by remediating slurry properties from the southeast quadrant of the site. At present, significant challenges exist relative to the preparation and delivery of feed of sludge directly from waste tanks. Eliminating these challenges could remove the need for a standalone pretreatment facility. If modification of the slurry properties is not accomplished, the throughput for the high-level waste system will be significantly reduced to accommodate the slurry transport conditions required to achieve overall system throughput. This presentation will summarize the effort to:
Attempt to remediate fast settling of high gibbsite phases through aluminum dissolution.
In parallel, assess whether high clarkeite waste can be blended with material less prone to pipeline plugging (such as material high in Zr) to produce slurries that can be effectively resuspended and transferred.
Finally, develop a pathway for the disposition of high phosphate and fluoride streams from sludge retrieval for bismuth-phosphate wastes.
In addition, initial characterization of select waste samples from the southeast quadrant will be discussed in light of a new characterization method to derive a particle size density distribution for tank waste samples.
