Brian Bradley
WC Monitor
10/9/2015
Washington Closure Hanford is scheduled next week to start leveling the last standing facility marked for demolition as part of the company’s River Corridor Cleanup project, specifically in the Hanford Site’s 300 Area, WCH President Scott Sax said last week during the Energy Department’s first National Cleanup Workshop in Arlington, Va. As WCH plans to start dismantlement of the three-story, 102,000-square-foot 324 Building, it is finishing cleanup of the facility’s most highly concentrated contamination area, in and underneath a two-story hot cell called the Radiochemical Engineering Complex B-Cell, he said. 324 houses one story below ground.
Budget shortfalls, including due to sequestration, along with some contamination that was found to be more extensive or more hazardous than expected, prevented the cleanup of the 220-square-mile Hanford river corridor from being completed by its originally expected end date of September 2015. Workers knew that liquid and fuel had been spilled in the cell, but did not anticipate finding a hole that had allowed a highly radioactive spill of cesium and strontium to spread on the ground beneath the building. 324 was built in 1965 to support materials and chemical process research and development, and operated until 1996. “We bored holes underneath the facility, and it took a full array of radiometric readings on that, and we mapped out a waste site underneath Building 324,” Sax said.
Placing 324 in a maintenance status for future demolition was one of two major projects incorporated in a one-year contract extension of WCH’s River Corridor Cleanup project announced in May of this year. The extension followed a 10-year closure contract, and also directed cleanup of the trenches at the 618-10 Burial Ground. DOE had added $400 million worth of work as of May to the original contract since it was awarded. The work covered under the contract through fiscal 2015 totaled just over $2.7 billion, and the additional year will bring the contract budget to a total of almost $2.9 billion. DOE does not anticipate extending the contract past September 2016, which appears to be the best time to end the contract, Doug Shoop, DOE deputy site manager for the Richland Operations Office, said in May.