The Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state is done with its remediation of the Plutonium Finishing Plant, according to a recently-posted staff report from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board.
The DOE Office of Environmental Management has approved Critical Decision 4 for the cleanup of the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP), “marking completion of the project,” according to a report dated Jan. 21 and posted on the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board website in recent days.
“The PFP footprint will remain covered by a clean cap of soil and fixative,” according to the one-page DNFSB staff report. Workers are still tearing down “demolish ancillary structures outside the PFP fence line” and equipment used during demolition “is being decontaminated or packaged as waste for disposal onsite.”
The DNFSB memo adds a bit more detail to an update DOE’s manager for the Hanford Site, Brian Vance, gave the Hanford Advisory Board during December.
The PFP site was to be turned over to surveillance and maintenance and project closeout activities, by Jan. 3, according to a monthly report published in December by Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Co., the remediation contractor in charge of keeping Hanford contamination from reaching the Columbia River.
After the COVID-19 pandemic caused a suspension of the work, crews resumed removing rubble in June 2020. The last major processing facility at the PFP came down a few months earlier. Work was also suspended for a time in December 2017 after the airborne spread of radioactive contamination affected about 40 employees.
In all, taking down the Plutonium Finishing Plant complex, where roughly 60 buildings once stood, began more than 20 years ago, according to the Washington Department of Ecology. Open-air demolition on the plant began in late 2016 using heavy equipment to tear down its walls. At the complex, plutonium nitrate liquid was made into hockey-puck-sized “buttons” that were then sent to domestic nuclear weapons production facilities.
