Decommissioning of the radioactively contaminated STURGIS barge has resumed at the Port of Galveston after Hurricane Harvey swept through coastal Texas in late August, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Wednesday.
There was no damage to the STURGIS or the decommissioning facility, and no signs that any radiation had been released into the environment, according to an update from Brenda Barber, project manager for the Army Corps Baltimore District’s Environmental and Munitions Design Center.
Work had stopped ahead of the storm, and the hurricane plan for the project activated. Environmental monitoring of the site was suspended under the hurricane plan, but has since been re-established, Barber said.
The STURGIS is a onetime World War II Liberty Ship that was subsequently equipped with a nuclear reactor to provide power for U.S. military and civilian operations in the Panama Canal in the 1960s and 1970s. It was towed from Virginia to the Port of Galveston in 2015 for decommissioning and disassembly.
As of June, 98 percent of the radioactivity on the barge, in the form of over 850,000 pounds of components, had been extracted and transported to permanent storage at Waste Control Specialists’ waste complex in West Texas.
“After all of the radioactive materials have been removed, the team will access the hull bottom tanks to complete the required surveys to allow the vessel to be released for shipbreaking,” Barber wrote.
The project is scheduled to be fully completed in summer 2019, a year after the previously anticipated finishing date. Decommissioning is expected to cost nearly $67 million.
The contractor for decommissioning, dismantlement, and disposal is CB&I Federal Services LLC.
