Richland reactor shut down for good

RICHLAND – Drilling into the core of the Fast Flux Test Facility has begun, killing the last hope of restarting the sodium-cooled research reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, officials said.

“We lost a real good friend,” Benton County Commissioner Claude L. Oliver said. “This is a real, real, real travesty for this nation.”

Even after the draining of liquid sodium began in April 2003, making a restart increasingly more difficult and costly, backers sought to save the 400-megawatt reactor to produce isotopes for new medical treatments for other research.

That possibility was eliminated Friday when Fluor Hanford workers began reaming hardened weld material over an opening where they plan to insert a drill, causing metal filings to drop into the reactor vessel – a development Oliver compared to putting metal shavings into an automobile engine.

“The reaming actually destroys it,” he said.

After the reaming, workers for the Energy Department contractor plan to drill through the inner vessel of the reactor to gain access to the outer vessel that contains liquid sodium. The next step is to insert a tube to drain the last sodium from the reactor.

Fast Flux, the department’s newest reactor, was used from 1982 to 1992 for national and international research, including the testing of advanced nuclear fuel and nuclear power plant operating procedures, and for production of numerous isotopes for medical and industrial use.

For lack of an economically viable mission, department officials ordered in 1993 that the reactor be shut down and the decision stood despite subsequent studies of potential uses ranging from production of tritium for hydrogen bombs to manufacture of radioactive isotopes for power in deep-space exploration.