The main cleanup contractor at the Hanford Site’s central plateau started tearing down the infamous “McCluskey Room” at the Plutonium Finishing Plant on Dec. 30, the Energy Department said Wednesday.
The room, officially called the Americium Recovery Facility, is where Hanford worker Harold McCluskey was exposed to a massive dose of americium by a glove box explosion in 1976. The facility, once used to separate americium from waste for possible industrial use, is slated to be torn down by March, along with the adjacent, much-larger Plutonium Reclamation Facility. Then the main 200,000-square-foot Plutonium Finishing Plant will be torn down, followed by the site’s ventilation building and stack.
CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. began demolishing the Plutonium Finishing Plant on Nov. 1. The facility, where DOE once pressed plutonium into hockey puck-shaped buttons for later insertion into nuclear weapons, is expected to be reduced to the concrete slab on which it was built by Sept. 30 — a year later than expected as recently as this time in 2016.
The Plutonium Finishing Plant is widely regarded as one of the most dangerous DOE demolition jobs in the country.
“Starting demolition of the Americium Recovery Facility brings another chapter of Hanford history to an end and represents a significant hazard reduction on the site,” said Tom Teynor, Department of Energy project director, in a press release.