Work crews have completed construction of a protective cocoon around another old plutonium production reactor at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Department of Energy said last week.
The steel structure around the K East Reactor is more than 120 feet tall and 150 feet wide, the DOE Office of Environmental Management said in an Oct. 26 press release.
Construction of this latest cocoon started roughly a year ago and should secure the structure while the radioactivity in the deactivated reactor core decays over decades, before the facility is ultimately disposed of.
Amentum-led Central Plateau Cleanup Company awarded two construction subcontracts worth about $9.5 million to Richland-based DGR Grant Construction in August 2021.
The K East Reactor ran from 1955 to 1971 as Hanford produced plutonium for the United States nuclear weapons program. It becomes the seventh of Hanford’s nine former reactors to be cocooned, according to DOE.