Hanford Wins Grant to Add Energy-efficient Steam Plant at Waste Treatment Plant

RICHLAND, Wash. — Plans to replace diesel-generated steam with electrically generated steam at the Hanford Site’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) are getting a funding boost from a recent $5 million DOE Assisting Federal Facilities with Energy Conservation Technologies Program grant.

The grant will partially fund the addition of a steam plant that uses electric boilers — instead of the current plant that uses diesel-powered boilers — to supply steam for WTP waste treatment processes.

Hanford’s tank waste treatment mission is vital to site cleanup, but energy intensive. This grant will allow Hanford to significantly reduce carbon emissions by substituting electric boilers for the diesel-powered boilers, with potential savings to the government of millions of dollars a year in energy and maintenance costs. The addition of an electric steam plant for WTP will also allow Hanford to make significant progress toward achieving the net-zero emissions goals of an executive order aiming to catalyze clean energy industries and jobs through federal sustainability.

“We’ll see a triple payback because, thanks to the grant, we can now free up $5 million in funding that would’ve been earmarked for the project,” shared Elaine Porcaro, EM’s chief engineer at Hanford who submitted the grant application. “Once the electric boilers are installed, we’ll save millions more per year in energy cost savings. We can do a lot with those cost savings every year by reinvesting it in cleanup.”

Much of the data Porcaro used in Hanford’s grant application came from a study developed by Energy Manager Christian Seavoy, with Hanford contractor Hanford Mission Integration Solutions. Seavoy’s study looked at Hanford’s potential energy usage and carbon emissions over the next 15 years and found that replacing the diesel boilers with electric ones would help Hanford reduce its carbon footprint by 43.3 million kilograms of carbon dioxide per year, or the equivalent of taking 9,636 gas-powered cars off the road for a year.

“The clean and affordable power available here at Hanford really works to our benefit in this situation because the costs to operate an electric steam plant will be so much lower than fuel costs for a diesel-powered plant,” said Seavoy. “Plus, we have an opportunity to drastically reduce our emissions. We can really make a big difference.”

-Contributor: Shane Edinger