Nuclear facility open to visitors
With high-security material shipped out, ‘gates are down’
RICHLAND – A tall double fence topped with loops of razor wire still surrounds key portions of Hanford’s Plutonium Finishing Plant.
But guards toting automatic weapons are gone. The X-ray machines and metal detectors more powerful than those used at airports have been ripped out of the building’s entrance.
And there’s no one left behind the thick bulletproof glass of the security center keeping an eye on those arriving at the plant. Instead, the glass has been plastered with stick-on Christmas decorations.
Until recently the Plutonium Finishing Plant was one of the most secure places in the nation, said Matt McCormick, Department of Energy assistant manager for central Hanford.
But Thursday, media and community leaders were invited inside for a rare look at the vaults where plutonium was once stored. At the same time, employees of the plant celebrated shipping out the last of the high-security material stored at the plant, including plutonium, for storage or disposal elsewhere.
About two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program passed through the plant during the Cold War.
Fuel was irradiated at Hanford reactors, the plutonium was separated from the fuel at the nuclear reservation’s processing plants, and then it was formed into metal buttons the size of hockey pucks at the Plutonium Finishing Plant to be shipped off-site for conversion to weapons use.
“The gates are down at PFP,” Dave Brockman, manager at the DOE Hanford Richland Operations Office, said Thursday at the employee celebration.
Clearing the plant of high security materials is a step toward getting the buildings cleaned out to tear down within the next few years as part of the environmental cleanup of the nuclear reservation.
“The plant is probably the largest risk to human health and environment” among the buildings in central Hanford, Brockman said.
To reach it, workers first went through the main security checkpoint, complete with the X-ray machines, metal detectors and radiation detectors – the latter to make sure they weren’t carrying any radioactive materials when they left the plant.
Then they’d pass through a second security checkpoint to enter the separate building that contained the main set of vaults. They’d go through another metal detector and slip their credentials through a slot to another security officer sitting behind a small glass window.
From the outside, the vaults look like those at banks with heavy steel doors that slowly swing open when pulled.
Inside are narrow aisles lined with floor to ceiling lockers. They hold what employees call “wine racks.” Coffee-can-size canisters holding plutonium were laid on their sides like wine bottles in the racks.
Removing a canister, which could weigh 20 pounds, required a convoy: Guards, two to four nuclear chemical operators, one to two radiological control technicians, a supervisor and a nuclear material safeguard specialist, said Bob Leonard, CH2M Hill decontamination and decommissioning manager for central Hanford.
The canister would be carried to a red wagon – about the size of a child’s wagon, but welded on it were carefully spaced holders for the canisters to make sure they were spaced far enough apart to prevent a criticality.
They’d be rolled through the building to be packaged in shipping containers. A “two person” rule was in effect in the rooms where that packaging was done to make sure no one was ever alone with the plutonium.