Demolition-related work could restart next week at the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant, but contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. has been cleared only to resume lower-hazard operations.
Most work has been stopped at the highly radioactively contaminated facility since December, when a spread of radioactive material was discovered for the second time in 2017.
On Wednesday, the Department of Energy notified CH2M that it was authorizing limited restart after verifying that issues identified in a review carried out by the company and parent firm Jacobs Engineering had been successfully addressed. The management review assessed the corrective actions implemented as a result of the June and December 2017 contamination spreads.
The Washington state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, both Hanford regulators, also lifted their January stop-work order for demolition-related work at the plant, but only for lower-risk work.
“The U.S. Department of Energy has adopted stronger safety measures that should reduce the risk to workers and the environment,” said Alex Smith, Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Program manager, on Thursday. “As a result we have partially lifted our stop-work order to allow lower-risk work.”
Lower-risk work includes loading out contaminated demolition debris from the main part of the plant. The debris has been left piled on the ground since most work halted in December. Only debris already packaged for disposal has been loaded out since the contamination spread in December. CH2M will resume work by packaging and removing the debris at the main plant. By December it could be ready to start demolition that is considered lower risk, the tear down of a portion of the main part of the plant.
The remaining work that is considered higher risk will not be restarted until after successful completion of a second management review, possibly in late winter or early spring. The Department of Ecology will assess whether new measures implemented to allow work to restart now have been successful, Smith said.
The higher-risk work will include demolition of the area of the main plant where workers once used two long lines of glove boxes to process plutonium that came into the facility in a liquid solution. During the Cold War the plant processed about two-thirds of the nation’s plutonium, turning it into “buttons” the size of hockey pucks and oxide powder to be shipped to weapons plants.
After the main plant is demolished, workers will return to the most contaminated section, the Plutonium Reclamation Facility annex at one end. Workers had all but stubs of its walls torn down when the December contamination spread was discovered. The last of the higher-risk work will involve tearing down the remainder of the facility’s walls and loading out the demolition debris, some of it left on the ground and covered with soil after most work stopped in December.
In June 2017, an air monitor at the Plutonium Finishing Plant sounded an alarm and workers were ordered to take cover indoors. Bioassay results showed 31 had inhaled or ingested small amounts of radioactive material. In December, another spread of contamination was discovered after demolition was nearly done on the Plutonium Reclamation Facility. Eleven more workers were found to have inhaled or ingested radioactive particles, and contamination was found on worker and government cars, some of which had already been driven off-site. In addition, very small amounts of airborne contamination were found miles away, including near the Columbia River and public Highway 240.
As demolition work restarts, the pace will be slower than last winter, said Tom Teynor, DOE project director for the plant. Demolition debris will be loaded out as small quantities accumulate before more demolition is done. Surveys for contamination and air monitoring will be increased, with checks made more frequently. Worker engagement will be increased, including in daily pre-job briefings. “If these new measures prove to be effective, we will fully lift the stop-work order and allow the high risk demolition to proceed,” Smith said.
The management review conducted Aug. 13-23 went well, said Jason Casper, the Jacobs demolition resumption manager for the plant. Three findings have been addressed. One new manager had not completed final qualifications, a drill that had been called off because of air polluted with wildfire smoke needed to be completed, and controls were improved for removing materials from areas inside radiological boundaries. Just days before the management assessment started, contaminated equipment was mistakenly loaded onto a truck and driven into nearby Richland before it was returned to Hanford.
The plant could be down to slab on grade, with sampling done and concrete foundations temporarily covered, by summer 2019. “It will be a great day for Hanford and for the state of Washington when the Plutonium Finishing Plant complex becomes a historical footnote rather than an ongoing threat to human health and the environment,” Smith said.
The legal deadline for teardown of the Plutonium Finishing Plant was September 2017, which itself was a one-year extension from a prior end date.
