The Department of Energy has officially acknowledged it will miss the Sept. 30 milestone set under the Tri-Party Agreement to have the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant torn down to slab on grade.
The federal agency notified its regulators, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington state Department of Ecology, on Sept. 1. “Tremendous progress has been made but for safety and other reasons it will take a few more months,” said Doug Shoop, manager of DOE’s Richland Operations Office at Hanford. The building, used during the Cold War to shape plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, could be demolished by the end of 2017 or early in 2018, he said.
Even after the Tri-Party Agreement milestone was extended last year from September 2016 to September 2017, Hanford officials warned that issues could still develop that would impair efforts to meet the new deadline. Demolition has been restricted this year by an unusually cold and snowy winter and then a windy spring. The project also has experienced two airborne contamination spreads during open-air demolition, slowing work both for subsequent recovery operations and then to increase employee safeguards.
Most recently, a union safety representative issued a stop work order shortly after the results of Washington state air sampling were received on Aug. 7. The results showed that air samples collected 3 miles from the plant on June 8 had low levels of contamination. On that date, about 350 workers at the plant were ordered to take cover when airborne radioactive contamination was detected during open air demolition. Worker bioassays collected after the incident also showed some personnel had low levels of internal contamination. Full test results are expected to be released this month.
Plutonium Finishing Plant demolition contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. and the Hanford Atomic Metal Trades Council reached an agreement for lifting the stop work order upon increasing the safety zone around the facility. The expanded zone includes multiple trailers used to support work at the plant. Rather than move the trailers, the workers and equipment have been relocated to facilities farther from the plant and demolition could resume by Sept. 8, according to Hanford officials.
The state Ecology Department is disappointed the milestone will be missed, but supports efforts to ensure demolition is done safely, said Ron Skinnerland, manager of Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Program’s waste management section.
DOE officials pointed out that the project is nearing completion about two decades after work began to clean out the plant and prepare it for demolition. “It is the largest, most complex plutonium facility in the entire nation and at one time was called the most dangerous building in the Weapons complex,” Shoop said.
Progress has been made toward demolishing the plant. An excavator began tearing down the Plutonium Reclamation Facility in November 2016, though demolition there was halted following the June 8 contamination spread.
The McCluskey Room, site of the 1976 explosion that contaminated worker Harold McCluskey, has been gone since March. The McCluskey Room connected the Plutonium Reclamation Facility to Z Plant, the main plutonium processing area of the PFP. In July, the 200-foot-tall ventilation stack fell in an explosive demolition. The underground ventilation building also has been demolished. Some limited teardown of Z Plant has been done, with initial work on a less-contaminated support area that included lockers. “The fact is the building is coming down and coming down safely,” said Ty Blackford, president of CH2M at Hanford.
The Plutonium Finishing Plant operated from 1949 to 1989 to convert plutonium nitrate solution into “buttons” the size of hockey pucks and plutonium oxide powder that could be shipped the country’s weapons production facilities. The plant worked on two-thirds of the plutonium produced for the nation’s Cold War nuclear weapons program.
