Test Facilities for the Demonstration of Pulse Jet Mixer Performance in the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant - 10275

The Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and immobilization Plant (WTP) is a complex of radioactive waste treatment processing facilities designed and constructed by Bechtel National, Inc. (BNI) for the US Department of Energy (DOE). The facility will convert the Hanford Site tank waste into a stable glass form. The processed waste will be shipped to other sites for ultimate disposal. EnergySolutions was awarded the contract to perform all work necessary to generate test data for the pulse jet mixing (PJM) systems in some of the WTP vessels. This contract included the detailed design, procurement, fabrication, installation, acceptance testing, data collection/testing, and decommissioning of a PJM Mixing Test Platform. The purpose of the PJM Mixing Test Platform is to demonstrate the Pretreatment Facility mixing behavior under normal and abnormal operating conditions. The test platform was fabricated early in 2009, in several modular skids, and started operation collecting NQA-1 data in July 2009. As a second part of this contract, EnergySolutions also engaged Washington State University (WSU) for small and full scale flume testing to collect critical data such as boundary shear stress at the sludge surface, zone of influence of a full scale PJM, and demonstrating the effectiveness of the tank discharge pump suction line in picking up the larger, higher density solid particles. This paper focuses mainly on the design, procurement, fabrication, and installation of the test facilities under an aggressive fast track schedule