During the next two decades the transuranic (TRU) wastes now stored in the burial trenches and storage facilities at the Hanford Site are to be retrieved, processed at the Waste Receiving and Processing Facility, and shipped to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, New Mexico for final disposal. Approximately 3.8% of the TRU waste to. be retrieved for shipment to WIPP was generated at the General Electric (GE) Vallecitos Nuclear Center (VNC) in Pleasanton, California and shipped to the Hanford Site for storage. The purpose of this report is to characterize these radioactive solid wastes using process knowledge, existing records, and oral history interviews. Since March 1956, the VNC has been owned and operated by GE as a nuclear reactor research and development facility. There are four reactors and five main reactor program support buildings onsite. Only one small nuclear test reactor remains operational while the other three test reactors have been shut down. The waste that was shipped to the Hanford Site was generated almost exclusively from the activities in Building 102, specifically those of the Plutonium Fuels Development Laboratory and the Plutonium Analytical Laboratory. Section 2.0 provides further details of the VNC physical plant, facility operations, facility history, and current status. The solid radioactive wastes that were sent by VNC to the Hanford Site were associated with two U.S. Atomic Energy Commission/U.S. Department of Energy reactor programs-the Fast Ceramic Reactor (FCR) program, and the Fast Flux Test Reactor (FFTR) program. vii WHC-EP-0672 These programs involved the fabrication and testing of fuel assemblies that utilized plutonium in an oxide form. The types and estimated quantities of waste resulting from these programs ere discussed in detail in Section 3.0. The packaging and handling of solid waste from the FCR and the FFTR programs varied considerably from each other. The waste generated by the FCR program was packaged into specially designed liners before being placed into shipping casks. The FFTR program wastes were packaged in large wooden boxes or 55-gal drums. A detailed discussion of the packaging and handling procedures used for the VNC radioactive wastes shipped to the Hanford Site is provided in Section 4.0. Information on the radioactive wastes generated at VNC can be found in a number of existing documents and databases. The most important of these are the Solid Waste Information and Tracking System database and Solid Waste Burial Records. Facility personnel also provide excellent information about past waste generation and the procedures used to handle that waste. Section 5.0 was compiled using these sources to characterize the radioactive wastes, especially TRU wastes, generated at VNC.
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