All employees of central Hanford were back at work Monday after an emergency was declared May 9 following the partial collapse of an underground tunnel storing radioactively contaminated equipment near the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant.
All but a couple hundred employees had returned to work last Thursday at the Department of Energy facility in Washington state. Those who were not called back until Monday were based at the waste storage tank farms near the PUREX facility and have been temporarily assigned to alternate locations.
Over the weekend nearly 150 large concrete ecology blocks were hauled on flatbed trailers to central Hanford. They will be used to hold down thick plastic that will be laid over the soil berm covering the tunnel. Plans continued to be finalized on Monday for covering the entire length of the tunnel. It will not be installed until the weather calms; gusty winds are predicted early this week. The plastic is intended to prevent any airborne radioactive contamination if there is a further tunnel collapse and also to keep rain from infiltrating the 8 feet of dirt above the tunnel, adding to the weight on the top of the tunnel.
A public meeting to discuss Hanford cleanup priorities planned for Wednesday evening has been postponed. Because of the tunnel collapse staff has not had time to prepare materials for the meeting, according to the Department of Energy and its regulators. A new date has not been set. Each spring, DOE, the Washington state Department of Ecology, and the Environmental Protection Agency convene a meeting to discuss the administration’s budget request for the coming fiscal year and to discuss work to be done in the fiscal year after that. The meeting had been scheduled even though no detailed administration budget request has been released for fiscal 2018, which begins on Oct. 1.
