On March 24, 2020, when the Department of Energy altered operations to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, the Hanford Site in Washington state rapidly went from having 400 to 4,500 people telecommuting, the head of the property’s service contractor told the online Waste Management Symposia on Tuesday.
The transition to mass telework cleanup property occurred over 14 days and involved having 1,000 off-site workers going through information technology training, said Robert Wilkinson, the president and program manager of Hanford Mission Integration Solutions — which took over in January from another Leidos-led joint venture in Hanford.
At the same time, when so many Hanford people were moving off-site, an additional 90 janitorial staffers were added for on-site deep cleaning, Wilkinson added.
At the multibillion-dollar Waste Treatment Plant, work practices were modified, said Bechtel senior vice president and project manager, Valerie McCain. In addition to adjusting schedules, operations at the vitrification plant quickly shifted to more outdoor chores, such as paving and grading, she added.
By the end of 2020, construction of all major infrastructure needed for direct-feed low-activity-waste operations was complete, McCain said. This would have been significant in any year, but especially so during the pandemic, she added.
Bechtel and DOE are legally required to start converting low-activity radioactive waste from Hanford’s underground tanks into a glass form for eventual disposal by the end of 2023.
Startup of operations at the vitrification plant means Hanford, as it did when it was a plutonium production complex, will be operating around the clock, said Hanford Manager Brian Vance. A little over two years ago, Vance became the manager for both the Office of River Protection as well as the Richland Operations Office at the Richland, Wash., facility.
Since then Vance has pushed an approach where Hanford runs as a single $2.6-billion enterprise, he said. In the end this “One Hanford” approach is designed to simplify the bureaucracy and hopefully improve remediation at DOE’s largest cleanup site, he added.
