Thermal imaging scans were being collected over 20 square miles at the center of the Hanford Site this week to help determine where radioactive waste might be buried.
A crew using a small airplane started the flights early Wednesday morning and expected to continue over early mornings for three to five days. Information is being recorded as the plane flies a grid pattern guided by a Global Positioning System from midnight to 4:30 a.m. to avoid sunlight and temperature fluctuations. Equipment can detect changes in heat down to one-hundredth of a degree Centigrade, said John Rendall, vice president of soil and groundwater remediation at Hanford cleanup contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation.
Thermal information collected by National Security Technologies of Nevada will be combined with earlier data. In 2015 a helicopter flew the same area. It was equipped with sensors to measure levels of radiation and distinguish among types of radiation to determine whether it might come from waste containing contaminants such as cesium, plutonium, and uranium. The heat data being collected now will be used to augment the radiation data.
“It gives us a starting point of where to go look,” said Mike Cline, DOE director of the soil and groundwater division at the former plutonium production site in Washington state. More work will follow to determine the extent and type of contamination buried in central Hanford, including sampling and other more intrusive characterization work.
It will take at least a couple months to analyze the data, as the flights will gather thousands, if not more, data points.
Among central Hanford’s burial grounds are 25 landfills that together received almost 16 million cubic feet of radioactive solid waste. The thermal imaging work will cost an estimated $100,000 to $125,000, including data analysis.
