nuclear-news

BY ANNETTE CARY acary@tricityherald.com The Department of Energy will not be able to meet a legally binding deadline to have Hanford’s Plutonium Finishing Plant demolished by the end of September, but demolition might be ready to start then.

DOE is in talks with its regulators, the Washington State Department of Ecology and the Environmental Protection Agency, to set a new Tri-Party Agreement deadline, said DOE spokesman Mark Heeter during a media tour of the nuclear reservation Monday.

The new deadline that DOE has proposed has not been made public.

DOE had long said that its contractor, CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co., would start tearing the main portion of the plant down in the spring of 2016 to meet the September deadline. Now it says demolition will start in the fall.

Preparing the plant for demolition has been some of the most hazardous work performed at any of DOE’s cleanup sites, say officials on the project.  The plant is the largest, most complex plutonium facility in the DOE cleanup complex, and parts of it were heavily contaminated with plutonium, including a form of plutonium that easily disperses into the air……..

Demolition of the plant will be done carefully with the building pulled apart “piece by piece,” Heeter said. What remains of the building will be disposed of either at a central Hanford landfill for low-level radioactive waste or eventually shipped to a national repository in New Mexico, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, for waste contaminated with plutonium.