The Department of Energy has established its panel of experts to help guide planning to stabilize an underground tunnel filled with radioactive waste from the Hanford Site’s PUREX Plant.
The eight-person group – consisting of DOE officials, representatives from Hanford cleanup contractor CH2M, U.S. academics, and a Canadian Nuclear Laboratories executive — will meet first on Friday “to analyze options and identify needs for PUREX Storage Tunnel 2,” Doug Shoop, manager of DOE’s Richland Operations Office, wrote in an Aug. 17 letter to Alexandra Smith, manager of the Washington state Ecology Department’s Nuclear Waste Program. Further meetings will be scheduled afterward.
Tunnel 2, built in 1964 of concrete and steel, stores 28 railcars with contaminated equipment from the plant once used to chemically treat irradiated fuel rods to extract plutonium for the U.S. nuclear deterrent. The tunnel was found in June to be at “high” risk of collapse, nearly two months after the roof of the older, shorter, wood PUREX Tunnel 1 was found to have partially collapsed.
CH2M announced this week that it had hired a local subcontractor to stabilize Tunnel 1 by filling it with grout. In a report issued on Aug. 1, the contractor listed a number of options for dealing with Tunnel 2, including grouting, filling void spaces with sand or clay, installing some form of covering, and a controlled collapse.
The expert panel meets the first of three schedule requests laid out in an Aug. 4 notice to DOE from the Ecology Department. The state agency is still waiting on a complete initial analysis of options and identification of data needs, then a finished analysis of the alternatives for stabilizing Tunnel 2 and selection of the strategy to be used.
The state has directed the Energy Department to by Oct. 2 submit a permit modification that will lay out the detailed plan for Tunnel 2, Ecology spokesman Randy Bradbury said Wednesday.
