The Hanford Site’s infamous McCluskey Room, the site of the 1976 explosion that injured worker Harold McCluskey, has been demolished.
CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. workers finished the project Wednesday, making it the first section of the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) to be taken down to slab on grade. “Completing demolition on this building was years in the making and is both historic and a significant risk reduction,” said Tom Teynor, Department of Energy project director for the plant’s demolition. “It closes the chapter on one important piece of Hanford’s history.”
The room, officially called the Americium Recovery Facility, was used to extract americium from waste for possible industrial or other use. It was one space in the PFP, where plutonium produced at Hanford during the Cold War arms race was shaped for use in nuclear weapons.
McCluskey, then 64, was restarting work on Aug. 30, 1976, in a glove box after equipment and materials had been left idle for four months by a worker strike. Resin that had degraded and reacted with nitric acid in an ion exchange column within the glove box exploded, spraying McCluskey’s face and neck with americium 241, acid, and shards of glass from the glove box window. He received a radiation dose 500 times the lifetime occupational limit, according to newspaper accounts at the time.
McCluskey would spend 150 days at Hanford’s Emergency Decontamination Facility for treatment, before being allowed to move with his wife into a small trailer parked next door while treatment continued. Most of the treatment involved repeatedly washing his skin and picking off debris, but he also received chelation therapy that reduced the americium in his body. He still had enough internal contamination when he moved home that a radiation detector would click rapidly when he held it near his head, earning him the nickname “Atomic Man”. He died 11 years after the explosion of a heart attack.
For most of the years since 1976, the entrance was welded shut to the Americium Recovery Facility, which Hanford workers called the McCluskey Room after the accident. American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds were used to cover 200 entries into the room in 2010 to start cleaning it out. Entries resumed in 2014 to prepare the facility, described as about the size of a two-car garage, for demolition. The glove boxes were removed, although highly contaminated, empty tanks were left in the facility to be removed during demolition. Some of the tanks held radioactive waste liquids.
The McCluskey Room was built onto one end of the Plutonium Finishing Plant, with the Plutonium Reclamation Facility then added to sandwich the room between the two larger sections of the building. McCluskey Room demolition began in late December with the removal of an airlock and then resumed several weeks ago following a snowy winter. An excavator with shears tore down the building, which was constructed of steel panels.
Contamination was controlled using foggers and water cannons that shot a stream of water and fixative onto areas being demolished, said Tom Bratvold, CH2M vice president of the plant closure project. A crane was used to extract tanks, some of which were packaged for possible disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant transuranic storage facility in New Mexico. Most of the debris from the McCluskey Room can be deposited at the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility in central Hanford.
Demolition crews were expected to move Friday from the McCluskey Room back to the Plutonium Reclamation Facility, which has already been partially taken down. “We have a lot of challenging work in front of us, but that’s what makes this satisfying,” said Jeremy Hulquist, CH2M field work supervisor for the Plutonium Finishing Plant demolition.
Plutonium Reclamation Facility tear-down is expected to be completed in June. Demolition of the main processing area of the plant and its ventilation building and stack are scheduled to begin in May. DOE faces a Tri-Party Agreement milestone to take the entire plant down to slab on grade in September, after a one-year extension from a previously set milestone.
