Workers at the Hanford Site in Washington state on Friday finished demolishing the most highly contaminated section of the Plutonium Finishing Plant, its Plutonium Reclamation Facility.
Demolition of the reclamation facility began in November 2016 and was almost complete before contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. issued a stop work order Wednesday following possible worker radiation exposures. The order was lifted Thursday. Demolition resumed Friday as the airborne control area around the work area was expanded.
Demolition had been slowed over the last 13 months, both by an unusually cold and wet winter and by problems with airborne radioactive contamination during open air-demolition with heavy equipment.
The Plutonium Reclamation Facility was added to one end of the plant in 1963 as demand increased during the Cold War for the plutonium supplied by Hanford for the U.S. nuclear deterrent. It recovered scrap plutonium from what otherwise would have been waste material at the Plutonium Finishing Plant.
The 22,000-square-foot reclamation facility included a central canyon area where 52 pencil tanks were hung on racks. Removing the pencil tanks took about four years, largely because of mechanical problems with an aging crane used during plutonium recovery and then to move the tanks into a maintenance bay during cleanout of the canyon to prepare for demolition.
All that remains of the Plutonium Finishing Plant is a central processing area where two processing lines of glove boxes converted plutonium in a liquid solution into metal buttons the size of hockey pucks to be shipped to the nation’s weapons production facilities. The Department of Energy missed first a September 2016 Tri-Party Agreement milestone and then a revised September 2017 deadline to have the entire plant down to slab on grade.
Demolition could be completed in a few weeks, according to Ty Blackford, president of CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. He said in a memo to workers Friday that challenges and risks remain at the project, both as the remaining demolition is done and as rubble from demolition is loaded out.
