Cleanup of plutonium at plant completed early

YAKIMA – Workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation have completed the removal of residual plutonium from a former finishing plant more than a year ahead of schedule, the U.S. Department of Energy announced Tuesday.

The project required removing plutonium held up in equipment, ventilation systems and other areas of the Plutonium Finishing Plant in order to reduce security requirements.

“This is a significant step in decommissioning of former production buildings that posed a significant hazard to our community, and further paves the way for their ultimate demolition,” Keith Klein, manager of the Energy Department’s Richland office, said in a news release.

Beginning in 1949, the Plutonium Finishing Plant was the last step in converting plutonium nitrate solutions into pure plutonium “buttons” about the size of hockey pucks, which were sent to other Energy Department sites to make atomic bombs.

The work stopped in 1989 at the end of the Cold War, but more than 18 tons of materials containing plutonium in some form remained.

Early last year, workers completed a project to stabilize and package the remaining 4.4 tons of plutonium — a project that was considered one of three critical cleanup problems at Hanford, along with underground tanks containing highly radioactive waste and corroding spent fuel rods from the nuclear reactors.

Workers have since packaged 511 drums of the residual plutonium from equipment and other systems, which will be sent to a nuclear waste repository in New Mexico.

The residual plutonium was to have been removed by September 2006 under the Tri-Party Agreement, the 1989 cleanup pact signed by the state, the Energy Department and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“It was not easy work by any stretch, very difficult to do,” said Bruce Klos, vice president at the Plutonium Finishing Plant complex for Fluor Hanford, the contractor hired to handle the cleanup.

The next step, Klos said, is to begin dismantling and tearing apart contaminated equipment to be packaged and sent to the New Mexico repository.

Current plans call for the plant to be demolished by 2009, several years ahead of the 2016 deadline in the Tri-Party Agreement.

For 40 years, the 586-square-mile reservation in south-central Washington made plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons, beginning with the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb.

Today, it is the nation’s most contaminated nuclear site.

Cleanup costs are expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion, with the work to be finished by 2035.