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 under the current 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 building operated from 1966 to 1972 as a commercial reprocessing plant to recover reusable plutonium and uranium from spent nuclear fuel. The state of New York eventually assumed ownership of the West Valley site that had been run by Nuclear Fuel Services and congress in 1980 made the Energy Department responsible for cleanup of the site.
Under the recent revision, CHBWV will deactivate the below-ground cells, allowing a future contractor to tear down the plant. 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-BWXT 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 cleanup at the site.
The Olean Times Herald reported Jan. 24 the DOE was “rethinking open-air demolition” of the Main Plant Process Building at West Valley, which would delay the schedule for tearing down the facility.
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.