Energy Department contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. on Tuesday began demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site in Richland, Wash., beginning with the south canyon airlocks of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility.
Demolition had been slated to start Monday but was delayed by high winds. Tuesday was another windy day on the central plateau, but CH2m was able to begin the job. News of the demolition startup spread on the Hanford Site Twitter account, where a tweet linked to a Facebook post that read, in part: “Today, Hanford employees started demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant.”
During the Cold War arms race, the Plutonium Finishing Plant pressed plutonium into the hockey puck-shaped buttons that eventually were fitted into the cores of U.S. nuclear warheads. The last of the finishing plant’s plutonium was shipped off-site in 2009.
Demolition begins with the 13-week teardown of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility: a chemical processing facility where workers recovered residual plutonium from various sources for later use in weapons. The first phase of demolition will also include the Americium Recovery Facility, another addition to the main 200,000-square-foot processing section of the plant. Work will then be paused to allow personnel to assess lessons learned and finish any remaining decontamination of the main portion of the plant before continuing demolition. The final work will involve taking down the ventilation stack and fan house.
In July, DOE and the state of Washington agreed to delay completion of the demolition of the Plutonium Finishing Plant by one year to Sept. 30, 2017. The building is widely acknowledged as the most dangerous cleanup project in the entire DOE nuclear complex.
DOE expects CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation to have the major demolition work completed next July, giving some extra time for any final work to bring the site to “slab on grade” status.
