About 100 workers at the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant are being moved to new offices outside of an expanded control zone around the facility. The move is due to “the overwhelming presence of naturally occurring radon in the PFP trailer village area,” workers were told in a message Wednesday.
A spread of radioactive contamination was detected after the near-completion of demolition of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility in mid-December. Demolition has been suspended since then at the Energy Department site in Washington state.
Routine surveys continue to detect the presence of radon, which is treated as potential contamination from the plant’s demolition zone until further analysis determines otherwise, according to the message.
Since the control zone around the plant was widely expanded on Jan. 7, workers have been required to park about a mile away and take shuttles to their offices or work area inside the control zone. The zone was established to tightly control access to the area around the plant. Now workers will be based at offices outside the control zone and will be shuttled back and forth to the plant as their work assignments dictate.
Plant workers on Wednesday issued a stop work order related to the office moves, concerned the shift would be made gradually instead of being completed immediately. The workers agreed to lift the stop work order later in the day on assurances that an effort would be made to complete the moves Wednesday and Thursday of this week, according to the Department of Energy. Any Hanford worker may order a stop to work if they have a safety concern.
Workers are temporarily assigned to offices in central Hanford until a new trailer office village can be established outside the plant’s control zone. For now, workers at other CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. projects in the Hanford 200 West Area are consolidating office space to make room for the plant employees. In addition, some unused office trailers are being refurbished. CH2M is in charge of the teardown of the Plutonium Finishing Plant, which is in the 200 West Area of central Hanford.
Work continues to prevent the spread of contamination.
Although the Plutonium Reclamation Facility has been nearly demolished to a Tri-Party Agreement requirement of slab on grade, two short portions of its walls remain standing 6 to 8 feet tall. The facility once stood six stories high, including a rooftop structure workers called the “penthouse.” The two wall stubs have not been torn down yet because demolition rubble was piled around them, according to Hanford officials. Fixative has been applied multiple times. On Saturday, soil will be piled over the remaining wall sections to provide a more stable, longer lasting protection.
Over the next few weeks workers who requested bioassays to check for inhaled or ingested contamination should receive results, according to the Department of Energy. As of Wednesday, 271 central Hanford workers had requested bioassays since the contamination spread was detected. They include 69 CH2M workers, 92 workers for tank farm contractor Washington River Protection Solutions, and 110 workers for Mission Support Alliance, the site-wide services contractor at Hanford.
An additional five government or contractor vehicles were found with possible radioactive contamination Tuesday as surveying of vehicles continues. Sixteen contaminated government and contractor vehicles were earlier determined to be contaminated, along with seven worker vehicles with exterior contamination. Some of the government and contractor vehicles might have been assigned to radiological zones where contamination was anticipated to be present.
