The Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state now will be reduced to a covered concrete slab by Sept. 30, 2017 — one year later than planned — under a modification announced Thursday to the Tri-Party Agreement that governs cleanup of the former plutonium production facility.
The delay has long been in the cards, even before Weapons Complex Monitor reported on May 20 that DOE was negotiating with the Washington state Department of Ecology to delay the end of demolition of the nearly 70 year-old Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP). During the Cold War arms race, the massive facility pressed plutonium into the hockey puck-shaped buttons that eventually were fitted into the cores of U.S. nuclear warheads.
The change order to the Tri-Party Agreement rolled out on the Washington state website Thursday was dated May 18. According to the change order, DOE and the state agreed on a one-year delay because “the magnitude of work needed and technical difficulties encountered to deactivate and decommission the PFP have been substantially greater than originally thought.”
The change order was signed by Stacy Charboneau, manager of DOE’s Richland Operations Office; Dennis McLerran, administrator for the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 10 in Seattle; and Maia Bellon, Washington Ecology Department director.
CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. is responsible for tearing down PFP, under a 10-year Hanford Site Central Plateau Remediation cost-plus contract awarded in 2008 and potentially worth $5.6 billion.
As a demolition project, DOE has repeatedly said PFP is one of the most dangerous buildings in the agency’s entire weapons complex. The pace of demolition at the facility slowed over the past year or so, with incidents of worker skin contamination and even low levels of internal worker contamination reported on-site.
CH2M replaced top project managers in February, and now requires workers to wear protective clothing and breathing apparatus for some PFP tasks. In addition, workers may not perform multiple tasks requiring protective gear at once.
Illustrative of the sort of difficulties workers face in the facility is the large, radio-contaminated glove box that was so large it had to be cut into pieces and moved outside through holes CH2M knocked in PFP’s inner walls. As a result, the old equipment was not removed from PFP until February, three months later than expected.
“Workers encountered more hazards than anticipated,” DOE and Washington state wrote in a fact sheet published Thursday along with the change order.
