The top federal manager at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site said this week that cleanup of the Plutonium Finishing Plant is basically finished, while a nuclear boss with the Washington Department of Ecology indicated there is a general agreement about future remediation needs at the former plutonium production hub.
Those were a couple of major takeaways from presentations by DOE’s Hanford site manager Brian Vance and David Bowen, the Washington Department of Ecology’s nuclear waste program manager, on Wednesday during an online meeting of the Hanford Advisory Board.
“At this point we are down to one or two punch list items,” at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) that should be done this week, Vance said. Most workers have already been transferred to other jobs at Hanford. “For all practical purposes the PFP project is no more,” Vance said.
Workers for DOE contractor Central Plateau Cleanup Co. resumed removing rubble from the Plutonium Finishing Plant in June after the work was suspended in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The last of the major buildings at the PFP came down in early 2020 and Vance said closeout paperwork will be completed within a couple of months.
The PFP is heavily contaminated with radioactive and chemical hazards left over from nearly a half-century of making plutonium at Hanford for U.S. defense efforts, according to the DOE.
Bowen, completing his first year as Washington Ecology’s top nuclear regulator, said there is much agreement between the state and DOE on what needs to be done to clean up the site.
The Ecology official is confident closed-door “holistic” talks between the state, DOE and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency should conclude “soon.”
“We agree on what needs to happen and about 90% of what needs to be done,” Bowen said. The “timing and pace” of the work is still being negotiated, the state official said.
The Washington Department of Ecology first proposed the talks in May 2019 after concluding that DOE was in danger of missing a dozen deadlines, many connected to radioactive tank waste, within the Tri-Party Agreement between the state, DOE and EPA, Bowen said.
