Molten Salt Oxidation (MSO) is a promising alternative to incineration for the treatment of a variety of organic wastes. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has prepared a facility in which an integrated pilot-scale MSO treatment system is being tested and demonstrated. The system consists of a MSO vessel with a dedicated off-gas treatment system, a salt recycle system, feed preparation equipment, and a ceramic final waste forms immobilization system. This integrated system was designed and engineered based on operational experience with an engineering-scale reactor unit and extensive laboratory development on salt recycle and final forms preparation. The MSO/off-gas system has been operational since December 1997. The salt recycle system and the ceramic final forms immobilization became operational in May and August, 1998, respectively. We have tested the MSO facility with various organic feeds, including chlorinated solvents, tributyl phosphate/kerosene, PCB-contaminated waste oils & solvents, booties, plastic pellets, ion exchanged resins, activated carbon, radioactive-spiked organics, and well-characterized low-level liquid mixed wastes. MSO is shown to be a versatile technology for hazardous waste treatment and may be a solution to many waste disposal problems in DOE sites. This report presents the results obtained from operation of the integrated pilot-scale MSO treatment system through …

Plans for disposing of the high-level radioactive wastes at the Hanford Site call for retrieving, pretreating, and finally immobilizing the wastes in a glass matrix. Since the cost for vitrifying and disposing of high-level wastes will be very great, pretreatment processes are being developed to reduce their volume. The baseline method for pretreating Hanford tank sludges is caustic leaching. Earlier studies with Hanford tank-sludge simulants and with actual Hanford tank sludges have indicated that treating water-washed and caustic-leached solids with oxidants can significantly increase the removal of Cr. Permanganate and ozone have been shown to be generally the most rapid and effective chemical agents for this purpose. The work described in this report continues to examine the effectiveness of solubilizing additional Cr from Hanford tank wastes by oxidation of the water-insoluble solids from tanks U-108, U-109, and SX-108 under alkaline conditions. The current study confirms that permanganate is highly effective at removing chromium from water solids under alkaline conditions, with Cr removals of up to 99+%. Elemental oxygen can also be highly effective, with removals up to 97+%.

The 2020 Vision project began in 1996 with two participating teachers and four classes. It has since grown to comprise more than a dozen participating teachers and hundreds of students across the country. Much of this growth took place in FY98, thanks to the accomplishment of several major goals: implementation of a mentor program, enhanced teacher training, a mid-year conference for students, recruitment of distant schools, and the development of an interactive Web site. The first part of this report describes these accomplishments, as well as future directions for 2020 Vision. The second part summarized the scenarios students wrote during the 1997-98 school year. it identifies recurrent themes in the students' scenarios and compares/contrasts them with scenarios written in the first two years of the project.

This report summarizes the well installation, plugging and abandonment, and redevelopment activities conducted during the federal fiscal year (FY) 1998 at the Y-12 Plant, Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Five new groundwater monitoring wells were installed at the Y-12 Plant under the FY 1998 drilling program. Two of the wells are located in west Bear Creek Valley, one is in the eastern Y-12 Plant area near Lake Reality, and two are located near the Oil Landfarm Waste Management Area, which were installed by Bechtel Jacobs Company LLC (Bechtel Jacobs) as part of a site characterization activity for the Oak Ridge Reservation (ORR) Disposal Cell. Also, two existing wells were upgraded and nine temporary piezometers were installed to characterize hydrogeologic conditions at the Disposal Cell site. In addition, 40 temporary piezometers were installed in the Boneyard/Bumyard area of Bear Creek Valley by Bechtel Jacobs as part of the accelerated remedial actions conducted by the Environmental Restoration Program. Ten monitoring wells at the Y-12 Plant were decommissioned in FY 1998. Two existing monitoring wells were redeveloped during FY 1998 (of these, GW-732 was redeveloped tsvice). All well installation and development (including redevelopment) was conducted following industry-standard methods and approved procedures from the Environmental Surveillance …

The Tanks Focus Area (TFA) serves as the DOE`s Office of Environmental Management`s national technology and solution development program for radioactive waste tank remediation. Its technical scope covers the major functions that comprise a complete tank remediation system: waste retrieval, waste pretreatment, waste immobilization, tank closure, and characterization of both the waste and tank with safety integrated into all the functions. In total, 17 technologies and technical solutions were selected for review. The purpose of each review was to understand the state of development of each technology selected for review and to identify issues to be resolved before the technology or technical solution progressed to the next level of maturity. The reviewers provided detailed technical and programmatic recommendations and comments. The disposition of these recommendations and comments and their impact on the program is documented in this report.