While deactivation of the Main Plant Process Building at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York is nearly finished, demolition will be done under a successor to the current site cleanup contract held by CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley (CHBWV).
The demolition was previously expected to start last year under the existing CHBWV contract. The news was shared during a Jan. 23 presentation to the West Valley Citizen Task Force by CHBWV President and General Manager Scott Anderson.
“In this particular instance, what DOE chose to do, in coordination with CHBWV, was to re-sequence the work,” a DOE spokesperson said in a Monday email. The current vendor will leave the building in a safe and stable condition for demolition under a future contract, but ancillary and peripheral structures are being taken down.
The building operated from 1966 to 1972 as a commercial reprocessing plant to recover reusable plutonium and uranium from spent nuclear fuel for owner Nuclear Fuel Services. The West Valley facility was the only commercial nuclear reprocessing facility in the United States.
About 640 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel was processed at the building, considered the most contaminated at the 200-acre site.
The state of New York eventually assumed ownership of the West Valley site. Congress in 1980 made the Energy Department responsible for cleanup and most of the cost.
Under the recent revision, CHBWV will deactivate the below-ground cells allowing a future contractor to tear down the plant. There is one main general-purpose cell, and three main supporting areas left. Some of the material is hazardous enough to require either remote handling, or the wearing of extra protective gear by workers.
The contractor has already removed extensive equipment, including piping, and material was removed from the Main Plant Process Building to prepare demolition. Allowing more time for additional radioactive source removal in some of the more challenging cells should simplify the future demolition and reduce risk, the spokesperson said.
The current $543 million CH2M-BWX Technologies contract, which began in August 2011, expires in March 2020. The Energy Department last fall issued a request for information as part of its market research for a future draft request for proposals for additional environmental remediation at the site. The next contract has been deemed “Phase 1B” of deactivating and demolishing buildings at West Valley, plus soil remediation.
No schedule has been issued by DOE for awarding the contract.
About 19,000 drums of solidified low-level waste has been shipped from West Valley to the Nevada Test Site for disposal, while 275 containers of high-level waste in a glass form were removed from the former reprocessing plant and are now located on an interim storage pad.
Deactivation of the Main Plant Process Building is 95 percent completed, Anderson said in his presentation to the task force. Complete decontamination and deactivation of the building is one of the contractor’s goals for this year. The facility is a reinforced concrete structure that is 130-feet-wide, 270-feet-long, and 79- feet-tall at its highest point.
Deactivating and tearing down the Main Plant Process Building is one of the top milestones left in Phase 1 remediation since demolition of the vitrification plant, in which 600,000 gallons of liquid radioactive waste was converted into a glass form for disposal, was finished last September.
Waste shipment from the vitrification plant is going strong. Anderson’s presentation indicates 416 intermodal containers of debris from the vit plant have been loaded and 413 have been shipped as of Jan. 16. The material is going to a former Alaron site in Pennsylvania operated by Veolia.
The West Valley Demonstration Project is located within the 3,300-acre Western New York Nuclear Service Center. The Energy Department is expected to issue a draft supplemental environmental impact statement by the end of 2020 on Phase 2 of cleanup work.
