Demolition began Wednesday on the Hanford Site’s Z Plant, the main processing building at the Plutonium Finishing Plant.
“Starting the work on the main processing facility complex marks the final step in demolition” of the Plutonium Finishing Plant, which was used during the Cold War to shape the material for use in nuclear weapons, said Tom Teynor, Department of Energy project director.
DOE in the 1990s began preparing the plant for open air-demolition using heavy equipment. The department is required under the Tri-Party Agreement with Washington state and the Environmental Protection Agency to have the plant down to slab on grade by September.
Two of the plant’s four main buildings already have been demolished. Work on the ventilation building, along with the recent explosive demolition of its stack, has been completed. The McCluskey Room, where worker Harold McCluskey was injured in a 1976 explosion, also has been demolished.
Demolition of the Z Plant started in one of its least contaminated areas, which contained workers’ lockers and areas where employees were helped to safely enter and exit the more contaminated areas of the plant. Demolition will advance from the outside to the inside at the plant, with another crew expected to resume demolition of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility as work on Z Plant progresses.
Z Plant, named because it was the last stop for plutonium at Hanford, operated from 1949 to 1989. It turned plutonium in a liquid solution into buttons the size of hockey pucks for shipment to nuclear weapon-manufacturing facilities. About two-thirds of the nation’s Cold War plutonium came off of the two processing lines at Z Plant.
Preparing the plant for demolition began in the 1990s with stabilization of plutonium left in the site after it shut down. Workers decontaminated and removed about 200 pieces of plutonium processing equipment, including glove boxes. The removal of two highly contaminated glove boxes was among of the most hazardous work performed across the DOE cleanup complex, according to the department. Workers also removed 1.5 miles of ventilation piping and processing lines contaminated with plutonium.
