Washington Closure Hanford isolated a barrel of waste that began smoking last week at the 618-10 Burial Ground of the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., and said no one was injured in the incident.
Washington Closure Hanford (WCH), which is in the final month of an 11-year, $3 billion cleanup contract for much of the site’s roughly 220-square-mile river corridor area, unearthed the troublesome barrel Thursday. In what the company called a “reaction” to oxygen, as opposed to an explosion, the barrel began smoking, forcing about 130 workers to take cover for about 90 minutes.
Jerry Holloway, a spokesperson for the AECOM-led WCH, wrote in a Monday email there were “no indications that hazardous material, either chemical or radiological, escaped from the drum.”
The Hanford river corridor cleanup project is nearly complete. The effort focused on the edge of the Hanford Site near the Columbia River and included dealing with nine former pluotnium production reactors and hundreds of other structures. The cleanup also included burial grounds such as 618-10, where contaminated waste was dumped during decades of plutonium refining during the Cold War nuclear arms race.
