Staff Reports
WC Monitor
9/25/2015
The Hanford Advisory Board has sent a letter of congratulations to the Department of Energy on progress toward tearing down the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant. The project remains at risk of missing a Tri-Party Agreement milestone to reduce the plant to slab on grade by the end of fiscal 2016. But the state of Washington, a party to the agreement, is thrilled with progress, said Jane Hedges, Washington’s nuclear waste program manager. Doug Shoop, deputy site manager for theDOE Richland Operations Office, told the board at its meeting this month that PFP is the most hazardous DOE facility to be demolished. “You can’t imagine how difficult this work is,” he said. Work to prepare the main portion of the plant for demolition is moving forward safely, said Stephanie Schleif, the facilities transition manager for the Washington Department of Ecology. “We don’t need a lot more money, a lot more crews out there,” Shoop said. “We just need the same people out there finishing the job because they are very well trained and doing a very good job.”
Workers experienced several radiological contamination incidents at the plant in July and August, some requiring skin decontamination. Some of the incidents have been linked to faulty seams in the protective suits worn by workers, while others occurred as the cumbersome protective gear was being removed after workers exited highly contaminated areas. Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board staffers at Hanford also have noted that work is now being done in areas with loose surface contamination that is highly mobile. Some of the most difficult decontamination work at the plant has been left until last.
A stand-down was held earlier this month to reorient workers to thinking about safety, said Bryan Foley, DOE deputy project director for work at PFP. “This year was the first time in many years where we had three high-hazard jobs going on in the PFP footprint all in the same year,” he said. They involved work on two high-hazard glove boxes; dismantling the glove boxes damaged in the 1976 explosion that injured Harold McCluskey, who came to be known as Hanford’s Atomic Man; and decontamination of the canyon floor of the PFP’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility.
The Hanford Advisory Board said it wanted to congratulate and recognize the outstanding accomplishments of the hands-on workforce. They have labored “hour after hour, in challenging and difficult conditions to remove the plutonium from contaminated gloveboxes, the critically damaged McCluskey Room, and other equipment for repackaging and offsite shipment,” the board’s letter to DOE said. “Their efforts exemplify the very best of professional and technically initiated cleanup activities.”
The difficulties of cleanout work have included using 50-year-old equipment. A crane needed to move pencil tanks inside the canyon of the Plutonium Reclamation Facility repeatedly broke down. Workers also required supplied air for some of the work and wore protective suits that limited visibility and added to the risk of heat stress. DOE has encouraged steady, slow, safe progress, Shoop said.
Efforts to prepare PFP for demolition stretches back to the 1990s when work began to stabilize plutonium in a liquid solution that was left there at the end of the Cold War. The plant was the last stop for plutonium at Hanford, turning the metal into hockey puck-sized buttons to be shipped off-site for use in nuclear weapons. In recent years, workers have been cleaning out and removing tanks and contaminated glove boxes from the plant. About 95 percent of the large pieces of equipment, including glove boxes and laboratory vent hoods, have been removed. Workers have removed or prepared for removal 233 of the plant’s 238 glove boxes. Some glove boxes will be taken out after the building’s walls come down around them, but two of the high-hazard glove boxes that stand more than 12 feet high and still contain extensive contamination are being cut up inside the plant.
The five remaining glove boxes that must be prepared for removal are in the Plutonium Reclamation Facility, which was added to the main PFP plant when Cold War demands for plutonium increased. It was used to recover plutonium from scrap material that previously would have been discarded as waste. Other work to prepare for demolition includes grouting the canyon floor of the Plutonium Reclamation Facility and continuing to remove contaminated ventilation ducts in the PFP.
PFP once had 81 facilities, but 64 of them have been cleaned out and torn down, with the Low-Level Liquid Waste Treatment Facility coming down in August. Before demolition of the main processing building of the plant begins, possibly next spring, the PFP’s emergency preparedness system will be checked, Shoop said. “We want to test that system and make sure it is tip-top in the unlikely event we do have an emergency,” he told the advisory board. Demolition of the main production portion of the PFP is expected to start with tearing down the Plutonium Reclamation Facility and then progress to the attached Americium Recovery Facility, which includes the McCluskey Room. That would leave the large section of the plant, which housed the plutonium production lines, for last. The project in full is now projected to cost in the mid-$900 million range.
