Crews at the West Valley Demonstration Project in New York have torn down a ventilation system building and will prepare to dismantle the Fuel Receiving and Storage Facility, the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said last week.
The recently-demolished Replacement Ventilation Unit was only built in the mid-2010s after crews deactivated the shuttered Main Plant’s ventilation systems out of service because of contamination, the Environmental Management (EM) office said in a June 23 news release.
DOE and BWXT-led contractor West Valley Cleanup Alliance demolished the Main Plant only last year, the department noted in the release. The Replacement Ventilation Unit was a one-story, 1,015-square-foot building with an updated filter and ventilation system, DOE said. Rubble from the ventilation building is being taken offsite for disposal.
The next West Valley structure scheduled for demolition, the Fuel Receiving and Storage Facility, was used from 1965 to 1972 to hold spent nuclear fuel before it was reprocessed at West Valley. Planning and preparation for the demolition are underway, according to a June 24 slide presentation to the West Valley Citizens Task Force.
West Valley, located 35 miles south of Buffalo, is owned by the state of New York, though DOE has the obligation to remediate the site and pay for 90% of the cleanup of the one-time reprocessing site.
West Valley Cleanup Alliance, made up of BWXT, Amentum and Geosyntec Consultants, has a $3-billion remediation contract for West Valley that runs through March 2034.