Mechanical and industrial contractor Intermech will build a dry storage area for highly radioactive cesium and strontium now stored underwater at the U.S. Energy Department’s Hanford Site in Washington state.
The North Carolina-based company on Oct. 17 received a $5.5 million subcontract from Hanford cleanup contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co.
Construction of the dry storage project for 1,936 capsules in the East Area of the Hanford Site should begin early next spring, said CH2M, the Jacobs subsidiary in charge of remediating Hanford’s Central Plateau and Columbia River Corridor.
The Energy Department currently keeps the capsules under 13 feet of water in a concrete pool at the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility in central Hanford. The agency expects to start transferring the capsules to dry storage in fiscal 2024 and finish the task by August 2025, sources said.
The Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility is an early 1970s structure built to hold radioactive cesium and strontium removed from Hanford Site storage tanks in order to reduce the temperature inside the tanks. The material is now held in stainless steel containers at WESF.
The planned storage area includes a dry-cask storage pad, utility infrastructure, and a haul road from the current wet storage site, CH2M said in a news release. Switching to dry storage reduces operating costs and cuts the risk of a radioactive release in the “unlikely” loss of cooling water from the storage basin during a major earthquake, the prime contractor added.
The transfer will also allow the Energy Department to prepare for deactivation of the WESF.
CH2M picked Georgia-based NAC International about three years ago to design and build 16 dry-storage casks to transport the capsules.
Intermech is an EMCOR company that also has offices in Idaho Falls, Idaho, and Richland, Wash. The firm is no stranger to Energy Department work or the Hanford Site, having previously been contracted by CH2M to stabilize two deteriorating tunnels for storage of waste from the Plutonium Uranium Extraction (PUREX) Plant. The vendor also designed HVAC duct work for the now-terminated Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
