5

Stakeholders’ and Public Comments

Sec. 3134 requires that “the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine shall provide an opportunity for public comment, with sufficient notice, to inform and improve the quality of the review.” The committee’s review has benefited from stakeholders’ and public comments received during the public meetings on December 12-13, 2017, in Washington, DC, and on February 28-March 1, 2018, in Richland, Washington, as well as those received via e-mail and mail. All comments are documented and made available in the project’s Public Access File.¹ Interested members of the public and stakeholders can communicate their views through e-mail, mail, brief presentations at the public meetings, the project’s Web submission form, and social media. Please note that all input received by the committee, including any names and e-mail addresses included in the input, will be made available in the Public Access File for the project and may be quoted in whole or in part in the committee’s report(s).

Before the most recent public meeting, outreach to the public and stakeholders was done via Twitter using the hashtag #Hanfordstudy, Eventbrite registration, the Hanford-Info listserv, which reached more than 1,400 contacts, and the Nuclear and Radiation Studies Board’s listserv, which reached a few hundred contacts. The National Academies media office also sent notifications to local news media and press about the public meeting. In addition, the study director contacted several key stakeholders via e-mail, including the Washington State Department of Ecology, the Region 10 Office of the Environmental Protection Agency, the State of Oregon Department of Energy, the Hanford Advisory Board, the Hanford Communities, the Tri-Cities Washington Economic Development Council (TRIDEC), and the Tribal Nations in the region. All of these stakeholders, except for some of the Tribal Nations, presented to the committee at the public meeting. The committee recognizes the informative presentation by Matthew Johnson of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation and understands that the Yakama Nation was not able to present due to its leadership’s attendance at another event. The committee will reissue invitations to the Yakama and other Tribal Nations to present during the next public meeting on July 23-24, 2018.

Overarching comments by the stakeholders and interested members of the public relating to the cleanup project at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation were:

• The cleanup of the Hanford site should be cost-effective, in compliance, and use best available technologies.
• Our goal is to get the site cleaned up. If a tank fails, this will be costly.
• We have been looking at the tank waste for half a century.
• Moving waste from the tanks must be high priority. This is important to our community. The tanks are deteriorating. We do not have time to lose.
• The health of tribal people and their culture is based on the ability to access and safely use the tribes’ traditional foods from the Hanford region.

Some of the comments focused on the Columbia River:

• The Columbia River must be protected.

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¹ See http://www8.nationalacademies.org/cp/ManageRequest.aspx?key=49905.

• While you were here, I hope you had a chance to walk its banks. It is the economic and ecological heart of the region, and the ancestral and modern-day home to tribes.
• This river’s importance to our state, our region, our identity is not debatable.
• We want to bicycle along the river and not be contaminated in the process.
• The Columbia River is at risk for generations to come.

Some other comments specifically related to the waste treatment technologies. The concept of “good as glass” was cited repeatedly and ardently by many speakers, although not by all. Other comments included:

• The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) needs to recognize vitrification as the baseline starting point for treatment of high-level waste (HLW) and low-activity waste (LAW); it is not helpful to act as if we start with a blank slate.
• DOE needs to stop pushing vitrification as a “Cadillac” technology.
• The design of the waste treatment system is inadequate for immense tanks containing highly variable waste that has a composition that is still changing. The tank chemistry is more complex than anybody in this room understands. Textbook chemistry does not apply at Hanford.
• The cited studies of grouting are almost all from more than a decade ago or older.
• We keep hearing that grout technology has improved. We have not seen the research and credible scientific evidence verified in the real world.
• Immobilized LAW decisions need to be evaluated against the background of existing contamination.
• Previously disposed legacy waste has already impacted groundwater and will continue to contribute to the overall site risk burden.
• A commenter representing a European technology firm (Knauf Insulation) stated that this company has developed and demonstrated a new melting technology that represents a very flexible and efficient option for stabilization of wastes and that the technology is capable of vitrification for LAWs. He requested that this melting technology be evaluated with respect to treating LAWs.

Finally, some comments opened up potential new lines of inquiry:

• Some commenters were not as concerned about the form of the waste if it could meet disposal criteria at sites outside Washington State and thus be shipped elsewhere.
• Investigate where DOE is unnecessarily following regulations that are not really relevant. DOE might be implementing complex and costly immobilization technologies based on definitions, not on actual chemical and/or physical properties of the wastes.
• Investigate processes to remove technetium. The technology is here today to scavenge the technetium.
• Investigate the cost of removing technetium and iodine versus the cost of grout and/or vitrification.
• There is an apt opportunity to modify or elaborate the current definition of HLW, which has driven the whole treatment plan by classifying essentially all tank waste as HLW.
• As to further waste reclassification, 137 of the tanks would likely contain transuranic (TRU) waste.
• Investigate cold processes. At a thermal facility, accidents are possible. Cold processes are much safer to workers and to the public.

COMMITTEE’S OBSERVATIONS

The committee appreciates the many informed presentations and public comments received from stakeholders and members of the public during its public meetings. A major underlying theme of the comments appears to be safety, especially in safely processing the wastes, protecting people (including future generations), and protecting the Columbia River and the surrounding environment. The Hanford region has sophisticated and engaged state regulators, Tribal Nations, and other stakeholder groups. The views and preferences of all of these groups will unavoidably be a significant element, in formal legal terms and political acceptance, of the selection of supplemental treatment of low-activity waste. For example, several, but not all, stakeholders have underscored their view that vitrification is their preferred waste treatment approach and that any other waste treatment method needs to produce waste forms as “good as glass.” In addition, peoples who have been living on the land and fishing the rivers in the Hanford region for several thousand years do not look at timelines in the same way as DOE. People from these cultures have emphasized that a priority for them is safe access to their traditional foods.

In the upcoming public meetings, the committee would like to learn more about the basis for the disparate claims on grouting technology, as well as about the basis of the views on “good as glass.” The committee notes Box 8.1 in the 2011 National Research Council report Waste Forms Technology and Performance, which discusses some possible approaches to “demonstrate that an alternative waste form is as good as glass.” Concerning stakeholders’ acceptance of non-vitrified waste forms, the committee recognizes that an additional evaluation of the applicable regulations that would accept legal compliance would be useful. Also, in a subsequent report, the committee will review the Federally Funded Research and Development Center’s (FFRDC’s) analysis of the other options that it has identified as well as new options as they arise, e.g., the potential use of water cleanup technologies applied at Fukushima Daiichi and the Knauf concept. In closing the committee reminds readers that Section 3134 of the FY2017 National Defense Authorization Act (see Appendix A) requires the FFRDC to perform a cross-technology evaluation to include vitrification, grouting, fluidized bed steam reforming, and any other treatment technologies that DOE or the FFRDC will identify.