HANFORD -- The Hanford Advisory Board is cautioning the Department of Energy to make sure it has some place to store vitrified Hanford waste for decades, but not permanently, because of delays in opening a national repository to dispose of the waste.

The Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires that high-level radioactive waste from Hanford be disposed of in a deep geologic repository after the vitrification plant starts operating and turning the waste into a stable glass form.

Congress directed the Department of Energy to study only Yucca Mountain, Nev., for the nation's repository in 1987, but whether or when Yucca Mountain might be ready to accept Hanford waste is unknown.

President Obama opposed using Yucca Mountain as a national repository during his campaign.

The Hanford Advisory Board steered clear of saying Yucca Mountain is an appropriate site as it considered advice to DOE at its February meeting. But it did recommend that DOE make finding a site for, studying and commissioning a deep geologic repository a priority at the national level.

In the meantime, steps must be taken at Hanford to safely store the waste without allowing it to be permanently left at the site, the board said.

It recommended that the Washington Department of Ecology issue a permit for temporary storage at Hanford that obliges DOE to move forward with deep geologic disposal before storage risks increase.

DOE is in the early stages now of considering two options for storing high-level vitrified waste at Hanford as glassified logs of high-level waste are produced at the vitrification plant beginning in 2019. It could retrofit the Canister Storage Building or it could construct a new building.

The Canister Storage Building was planned to support an earlier plan for a vitrification plant rather than the $12.2 billion Waste Treatment Plant now being constructed.

One of its three vaults have been finished and is being used to hold irradiated fuel that had been stored in the K Basins. At the end of the Cold War, irradiated fuel was left stored in the basins attached to the K East and K West reactors rather than being processed to remove plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.

The Canister Storage Building has two other underground vaults that don't have steel tubes installed to hold the fuel or ventilation systems. In addition, a shipping facility would have to be added with a system to move the vitrified waste underground through tunnels, bringing the total cost of the project to $173.8 million based on the costs of labor and material in 2005, said Steve Pfaff, of the DOE Hanford Office of River Protection.

The finished vaults would hold 880 canisters of vitrified waste or about two years of the vitrification plant's production.

The building also could be expanded to make room for 4,000 additional canisters using less expensive options than steel tubes and underground storage if delays in opening a national repository continue. But it could be made no larger than that because of the location of waste transfer lines, Pfaff said.

The second option is building the proposed Combined Hanford Shipping and Canister Storage Facility nearby. It would hold 2,000 canisters in its first storage module which would cost an estimated $175.3 million in 2005 dollars, or roughly the same as retrofitting the Canister Storage Building for 880 canisters.

The new building could be expanded to hold a total of 12,000 canisters.

DOE has instructed the new tank farm contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, to prepare more detailed cost estimates on the options.