The Department of Energy has officially acknowledged it will miss the Sept. 30 milestone set under the Tri-Party Agreement to have the Hanford Site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant torn down to slab on grade.
The federal agency notified its regulators, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington state Department of Ecology, on Friday. “Tremendous progress has been made but for safety and other reasons it will take a few more months,” said Doug Shoop, manager of DOE’s Richland Operations Office at Hanford. The building, used during the Cold War to shape plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, could be demolished by the end of 2017 or early in 2018, he said.
Even after the Tri-Party Agreement milestone was extended last year from September 2016 to September 2017, Hanford officials warned that issues could still crop up that would make the new milestone difficult to meet. The project has been plagued by bad weather this year, with an unusually cold and snowy winter and then a windy spring limiting demolition. The project also has experienced two airborne contamination spreads during open-air demolition.
The Washington state Department of Ecology is disappointed the milestone will be missed, but supports efforts to ensure demolition is done safely, said Ron Skinnerland, manager of Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Program’s waste management section. DOE officials pointed out that the project was nearing completion about two decades after work began to clean out the plant and prepare it for demolition. “It is the largest, most complex plutonium facility in the entire nation and at one time was called the most dangerous building in the Weapons complex,” Shoop said.
