September 2016 Milestone Still Uncertain
Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
6/19/2015
Significant progress is being made in the demolition of Hanford’s Plutonium Finishing Plant, and though it is set to be one of the Department of Energy’s major cleanup achievements in 2016 it is not clear if it will meet its completion milestone, DOE Richland Operations Office Deputy River and Plateau Assistant Manager Jon Peschong said in an interview with WC Monitor last month. Hanford cleanup contractor CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Co. aims to completely demolish the facility to “slab on grade” by the September 2016 date in the Tri-Party agreement between DOE, the state of Washington, and the Environmental Protection Agency. “We all hope that we can meet it, but PFP has a strong ability to surprise us. Safety comes first,” Peschong said. “We are not going to sacrifice safety to meet that milestone. There’s a good will across all the stakeholders that given the progress we have made, while that milestone is important, history will look back and the fact that we got it done safely will mean more than if we got it done a month late or two months late.”
The PFP produced plutonium metal during the Cold War and was shut down in 1996. In recent months the project has met numerous milestones in preparation for demolition, which is on schedule to begin in the spring of 2016 and last from two to six months, Peschong said. Major achievements so far this year include removal of all 52 highly contaminated pencil tank assemblies from PFP’s canyon, as well as the removal of the “atomic man” glovebox that exploded in an infamous 1976 incident that peppered a worker with radioactive shrapnel.
There are several efforts that still need to be wrapped up before demolition can begin in the spring. That includes cleanup of equipment and pouring of a grout slab in the Plutonium Recovery Facility portion of the plant, which will provide contamination shielding and a flat floor to prepare it for open-air demo. In the McCluskey room, where the 1976 explosion occurred, out of the five original gloveboxes only one still needs to be removed. “We expect to have the last glovebox we need to have removed done in the next couple of weeks,” Peschong said. “There are some tanks in there that fed those gloveboxes behind a wall that we previously thought we would have to size reduce, but we assayed them and it looks like we will be able to fix the contamination and remove them whole during demolition.”
However, the biggest challenge remaining is removing the large amount of ducting still in the PFP canyon itself, an effort that began about a year ago. “The long pole in that tent is quickly becoming the ducting,” Peschong said. He added, “The mental image to have is it’s really crowded in the ducting area of PFP. It’s hard work. It’s also the kind of work that becomes easier as you clear some space for yourself by removing that ducting. It’s challenging work. We’d all be happy to be entering the demolition phase by spring, and we think we can get there.”
The project is also making improvements after last September DOE’s Inspector General found issues with CHPRC’s ability to plan, manage and execute work, which contributed to significant delays and cost increases, Peschong said. The contractor is currently implementing corrective actions. “There’s no doubt that there is better focus at the project,” he said, citing a host of actions already implemented relating to productivity reviews of project systems. “You can tell that just by the progress being made at PFP,” he said. “Is it perfect? No. Can they get better? Yes. But it’s far better than what it was. It’s those issues combined with PFP, which is just a hard animal to deal with. It was never meant to be torn down.”
A tremendous amount of work has been completed at PFP, Peschong said, crediting the workers for much of the success. “Men and women get up in the morning and they have their breakfast like you or me and they go to work in McCluskey room. That room was uninhabitable, it was sealed shut, it was highly contaminated. I think that’s just astonishing,” he said. “That room was opened up after 30 some years, and piece by piece, day by day, we are within a couple of weeks of getting the last glovebox out of there. That’s historic. …It’s been a long time coming and it’s pretty sobering when you look back at all the work the country had to do to get the facility where it is today.”
