Process Control Plan for Tank 241-SY-101 Surface Level Rise Remediation

The tank 241-SY-101 transfer system was conceived and designed to address the immediate needs presented by rapidly changing waste conditions in tank 241-SY-101. Within the last year or so, the waste in this tank has exhibited unexpected behavior (Rassat et al. 1999) in the form of rapidly increasing crust growth. This growth has been brought about by a rapidly increasing rate of gas entrapment within the crust. It has been conceived that the lack of crust agitation beginning upon the advent of mixer pump operations may have set-up a more consolidated, gas impermeable barrier when compared to a crust regularly broken up by the prior buoyant displacement events within the tank. As a result, a series of level-growth remediation activities have been developed for tank 241-SY-101. The initial activities are also known as near-term crust mitigation. The first activity of near-term mitigation is to perform the small transfer of convective waste from tank 241-SY-101 into tank 241-SY-102. A 100 kgal transfer represents about a 10% volume reduction allowing a 10% water in-tank dilution. Current thinking holds that this should be enough to dissolve nitrite solids in the crust and perhaps largely eliminate gas retention problem in the crust (Raymond 1999)