On Monday, the Central Plateau Cleanup Company awarded a $9.5 million subcontract to DGR Grant Construction Inc. of Richland to build a steel enclosure over the site’s K East Reactor.
The work is to be finished by 2023. The Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Company (CPCC) is the prime contractor for solid waste cleanup in the interior of the former plutonium production reservation, including Hanford’s shuttered production reactors.
Slightly larger than the other seven reactors, the K East and K West reactors are the only ones not yet cocooned. They are last in the queue because spent nuclear fuel had to be removed from their pools.
The new type of cocooning with the K East reactor includes DGR Grant Construction building a steel framework with added steel plates over the core building. This concept has been on the drawing board since 2012.
The new approach is intended to make the area safer to work in. Workers won’t have to deal with pipes and other entrances to the core building that are 80 to 100 feet above the ground, or with an old, unsafe roof on the core building. The enclosure will not be attached to the core building so the core structure won’t have to be reinforced.
Work still will be done inside the core building to remove lead, oils and other hazardous substances.
Cocooning is a Hanford process in which all of a defunct reactor’s outlying buildings are torn down and the core building sealed off. The concept calls for waiting 75 years for the reactor’s radiation to drop to a point where the core itself is safe to tear down.
So far, Hanford has “cocooned six of its nine defunct plutonium production reactors. B Reactor, the world’s first industrial-sized reactor which created the plutonium for the Nagasaki atomic bomb, is being preserved as a historical site.
