Despite a few unplanned days off due to wicked winter weather in Washington state, the Energy Department still expects to tear down the Plutonium Finishing Plant at the Hanford Site to the concrete slab on which it was built by a Sept. 30 regulatory deadline, a DOE official said Monday.
“Right now, we still think we can meet the milestone,” Tom Teynor, project director of DOE’s Plutonium Finishing Plant Closure Division, said in a presentation to the agency-chartered, locally staffed Hanford Advisory Board. “We’re not sitting idly by, and the workforce has been very flexible these last few months, with holiday stand downs and the weather.”
The board met Tuesday in Richland, Wash. The meeting was webcast.
DOE contractor CH2M Plateau Remediation Co. started demolishing the Plutonium Finishing Plant on Nov. 1. The company is now nearing the end of a 13-week teardown of the plant’s Plutonium Reclamation Facility: an effort slated to wrap up in late February, Teynor said Monday.
Around the same time, CH2M expects to finish demolition of the plant’s 242-Z Americium Recovery Facility, also known as the McCluskey Room. In 1976, Hanford worker Harold McCluskey was exposed to a massive dose of americium in this facility after a glove box explosion.
Hanford is a former plutonium production facility operated during World War II and the Cold War. The Plutonium Finishing Plant pressed plutonium into the hockey puck-shaped buttons that were later fitted into nuclear weapons.
The Department of Energy once expected to have the Plutonium Finishing Plant, often called the most dangerous demolition job in the agency’s nuclear complex, torn down by Sept. 30, 2016. After the building was found to be more contaminated than expected, the Washington state Department of Ecology allowed DOE to delay the milestone by one year.
CH2M’s 10-year Hanford Site Central Plateau Remediation contract runs through Sept. 30, 2018, and is worth roughly $6 billion, including a five-year option DOE has picked up.
