Reactor’S Columbia Voyage Ends Safely Two Tug Boats Pushed Vessel For 36 Hours Over 270 Miles

A decommissioned 1,000-ton nuclear reactor vessel finished its voyage up the Columbia River on Sunday, docking safely just miles from a burial site for radioactive waste.

It took about 36 hours for two tugs to bring the vessel, emptied of its uranium fuel, up 270 miles of river from the dismantled Trojan Nuclear Plant northwest of Portland. That included a two-hour precautionary stop early Sunday at Pasco to wait for daylight on the last 10-mile stretch.

The voyage ended at 9 a.m.

“It went very well,” said Steve Nichols, project manager for Portland General Electric, the utility decommissioning the largest commercial reactor ever taken off line in the United States. “It’s been very routine.”

The river voyage past Portland made it the first commercial reactor of that size and level of contamination to pass so near a major American city, according to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

No demonstrators were on hand when the barge docked at the nearby river Port of Benton, part of a region of south-central Washington that has been closely tied to nuclear development since World War II.

Instead, a handful of people stood atop a bluff a couple hundred yards away with video cameras, recording the arrival of the dumbbell-shape reactor and supports, pressure-wrapped in a royal blue weatherproof cover.

“It looks pretty harmless,” said Linda Cave of Hermiston, Ore., videotaping for her husband, who was part of the reactor transportation crew. “It’s a lot littler than I expected” at 46 feet long, 21 feet across and just over 27 feet high.

The reactor was mounted on a 16-axle trailer with 320 wheels to support its enormous weight. It took about seven hours to get the entire unit off the barge before it departed on a 20-mile trip, partly on a relatively isolated public highway, to the burial site at Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

Two extra-large trucks, called prime movers and nicknamed “Beauty” and “the Beast” by crews, were on either end of the trailer to push and pull it to the site, where the region sends its low-level radioactive waste under a Northwest disposal compact.

The 560-square-mile Hanford reservation is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site, after making plutonium from the 1940s to the 1980s for the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

PGE already had shipped Trojan’s contaminated steam generators upriver to Hanford since 1995, and the Navy often ships reactors from submarines and cruisers up the Columbia for burial at the site.

Although it no longer holds its uranium fuel, the Trojan reactor vessel contains 15 times as much radioactivity as those objects, according to state officials.

However, after being filled with concrete and encased in 6-inch-thick steel, the reactor was considered safe for shipment. Workers handling it wear no more protection than a hard hat.

The reactor will be put in a 45-foot-deep trench at the burial site. It is scheduled to go into the trench on Tuesday, but the burial process will take about three months, according to US Ecology, which manages the disposal site.

The Trojan plant operated for 16 years, generating enough electricity to supply all of Portland.

It was shut down in 1993, two decades earlier than planned, after a series of problems including a faulty safety system that drew federal fines, an accidental release of radioactive gases and cracked steam tubes.

Nearly 800 spent but highly radioactive uranium fuel rod assemblies removed from the reactor remain in storage at the Trojan site.