Kenneth Fletcher
WC Monitor
2/28/2014
Hanford cleanup contractor CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Co. is still holding fast to its 2016 milestone for the Plutonium Finishing Plant D&D project and is gaining more certainty in its schedule since a technical study last fall gave it a 50 percent probability for meeting that date. “PFP is continuing to track toward finishing to be a slab on grade by 2016. We have a schedule to support that,” CHPRC CEO John Fulton told WC Monitor this week. He noted that a technical study completed last September to measure probability, known as a Monte Carlo analysis, found that the project has “about a 50-50 chance to complete by September of 2016 based on our current level of uncertainty.” However, progress made at the project since then has increased the schedule certainty, Fulton said.
The plant produced plutonium metal during the Cold War and was shut down in 1996, and aims to be completely demolished “slab on grade” by the September 2016 date in the Tri-Party agreement between the state of Washington, the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency. CHPRC is currently approaching 70 percent complete on PFP deactivation. “You improve your certainty with every day because you get more complete, and you inch ever closer to 100 percent complete,” Fulton said. He added, “We have almost 200 gloveboxes already removed out of PFP and we have 30 or so left to go. We are at the tail end of this. We are in the last third of the pencil tanks to go.”
Crane, McCluskey Room Cause Uncertainity
The level of uncertainty in last fall’s analysis is mainly linked to technical uncertainty, not issues such as budget and weather. That includes questions surrounding the canyon crane, which previously experienced a number of operational issues, as well as the so-called “McCluskey Room,” which was the site of a well-known contamination incident in the 1970s and hasn’t been fully characterized since. “We’ll probably run that Monte Carlo again this summer and see where it comes out, we expect it would be higher,” Fulton said. “So the goal is to each and every day to execute your work such that the certainty increases day by day. We’ve been seeing good results from that. Our rate of work execution and completion of work evolutions has improved over the last several months.”
DOE said this week that progress is continuing at the PFP. “The main consideration for DOE is completing work safely, and CHPRC has shown progress in improving safety, productivity, and enhancing its technical approach,” Geoff Tyree, a spokesman for the Department’s Richland Operations Office, said in a written response. “Thanks to the repairs on the canyon crane, the contractor will be able to continue removing the tanks safely. Different materials are being evaluated for filling the glove boxes with a non-combustible substance, and other preliminary work will be completed before the contractor seeks DOE approval.”
Canyon Crane Operations Have Improved
The canyon crane is used in cleanup of the pencil tanks at the plutonium reclamation facility. “For about a year and a half the PRF canyon crane, pretty much every part on it failed and we had to replace it,” Fulton said. “We’ve pretty much gone through the whole thing and replaced every part on it. It’s been fully operational since mid-November and we’ve been using the heck out of it and so far it’s run real well.” The crane is used to remove the long thin pencil tanks that line the walls of the canyon at the PRF and take them over to workers. Through gloves fixed onto the sidewall of the facility the workers use equipment to cut up the tanks which are then packaged for disposal. There are about 70 pencil tanks remaining, Fulton said.
Workers to Enter McCluskey Room Within Months
The McCluskey Room, also known as 242-Z, is named for Harold McCluskey, who in 1976 was exposed to a high dose of americium after an explosion at that facility. Fulton said this week that a “more complete characterization” is still needed there. “When we get a little more information on that it will raise our certainty level a bit,” Fulton said. “We’ll be going into that room in the next couple of months and getting better characterization and a better understanding of what the scope is in there precisely and that will help reduce the uncertainty factor as well.”
In preparation for entering 242-7, CHPRC recently sent a team of workers to Idaho’s Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project to observe equipment that may help at PFP. That includes protective suits for entering areas with airborne contamination, which are equipped with a supplied breathing air system. “We know that’s the kind of suit we’re going to deploy to enter the McCluskey room and do the work in there,” Fulton said. “We have that equipment on order and should be deploying it in a couple of months.”
Contractor Hoping to Foam Large Gloveboxes
Another issue being worked on is the disposal of several large gloveboxes with fairly high plutonium contamination. “We have three gloveboxes at PFP that are massive; 16 feet tall, 25 feet long, 8 feet wide. That’s not going to go into a [Waste Isolation Pilot Plant] package, right? So you have to reduce its size to put it into a package that can go into the WIPP shipping system,” Fulton said. However, before cutting them up CHPRC is proposing filling them with foam, which “locks up the contamination in the foam and it adheres to the walls of the glovebox, it stabilizes things structurally so that when you cut it it doesn’t just crumble and it also locks up the contamination so it can’t disperse,” he said.
But CHPRC and DOE are still finalizing plans for approval of foaming gloveboxes, which hasn’t yet been done at PFP. If one of those gloveboxes is not foamed, it would instead become what’s called a “high mass glovebox” that can’t be shipped off site. Instead, CHPRC has received permission to store a potential high mass glovebox at Hanford’s central waste complex for future processing. “We haven’t generated a high mass glovebox yet at PFP. We hope we never will,” Fulton said. “We don’t want to create that unless we absolutely have to. Our goal is to remove all the waste from PFP and package it for ultimate disposal.”
