Registration opens at 9 a.m. March 19 for all of the Department of Energy’s 2019 environmental cleanup tours of the Hanford Site in Washington state. Twenty tours will be offered this year, with all bus seats expected to be claimed in a matter of hours.
Registration is only available via the Hanford.gov website. However, a limited number of walk-ons are expected to be allowed. Call 509-376-5840 for information.
Tours will leave at 8 a.m. from the Mission Support Alliance offices at 2490 Garlick Blvd. in nearby Richland. Participants must be U.S. citizens and at least 18 years old. They must have government photo identification, such as a driver’s license, with a name that exactly matches the name given for registration to board the bus.
Tour dates are April 17, 23, and 25; May 1, 7, 9, and 16; June 19, 25, and 27; July 17, 23, 25, and 31; and Aug. 6, 8, 14, 20, 22, and 28.
This year the tours will include a briefing on the PUREX Plant tunnels as the second of the tunnels is filled with concrete-like grout to prevent a collapse. The first tunnel holding railcars loaded with radioactive waste partially collapsed in May 2017.
Briefings also will cover the Waste Treatment Plant, which is being built to treat much of the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste held in underground tanks at Hanford; and the 200 West Pump and Treat facility, which removes chemical, radioactive, and organic contaminants from groundwater.
The tour bus will stop at Hanford’s Cold Test Facility, an above-ground mockup of an underground storage tank used to demonstrate tank waste retrieval technology. Participants also will be briefed on work to remove radioactive sludge from underwater containers in the K West Reactor Basin near the Columbia River and truck it to dry storage at the T Plant in central Hanford.
Manhattan Project National Historical Park tours also are offered at Hanford, but the 2019 tour schedule has not been announced.
Brian Stickney as of this week is the new assistant manager for safety and environment for the Department of Energy Richland Operations Office at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
Stickney had been the deputy assistant manager for safety and environment since August 2016 and served as manager in an acting capacity for eight months, “providing exemplary leadership and critical mission expertise,” said DOE Hanford Manager Brian Vance in an announcement.
Stickney joined the Richland Operations Office in 2016 after serving for seven years as a facility representative and program manager for DOE at the Hanford tank farms and as health division director for the Hanford DOE Office of River Protection.
The Richland Operation Office oversees most cleanup operations at Hanford, minus radioactive tank waste activities managed by the Office of River Protection.
