PHOENIX – EM’s Richland Operations Office (RL) has developed a new vision to help guide the Hanford Site cleanup in the next decade as the focus of work increasingly shifts to the site’s Central Plateau, federal and contractor officials said here earlier this month.

   In a panel session at the annual Waste Management Conference, RL Manager Stacy Charboneau outlined the planned work scope through 2028, including:

• Completing the transfer of more than 1,900 cesium and strontium capsules from wet storage to dry storage;
• Expanding groundwater remediation;
• Retrieving and treating contact- and remote-handled transuranic waste for eventual off-site shipment;
• Initiating disposition of Hanford’s former “canyons,” the facilities where plutonium was removed from spent nuclear fuel for processing at the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP); and
• Completing upgrades to infrastructure to allow continued safe and effective operations. 

   EM is nearing completion of a significant cleanup project at Hanford’s Central Plateau —demolition of the PFP to slab-on-grade. Site cleanup contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. (CHPRC) has removed more than half of the facility’s 7,100 feet of process vacuum piping, more than 70 percent of filter boxes, almost 90 percent of the plant’s asbestos, all of the 196 pencil tank units, and almost all of the 238 gloveboxes, according to CHPRC President and CEO John Ciucci. 

   PFP demolition is set to begin later this year, Charboneau said. According to Ciucci, the first section of the PFP to be addressed will be the Plutonium Reclamation Facility, followed by the “McCluskey Room,” named after worker Harold McCluskey, who was involved in an accident there in 1976. Demolition is then expected to move to the bulk of the PFP, with the last section to be addressed to be the plant’s Fan House and Stack, Ciucci said. He added that the PFP demolition to slab-on-grade will free up resources for use elsewhere.

   The work to be accomplished over the next 10 to 12 years at the Central Plateau will build on EM’s significant success in cleanup along the Columbia River corridor at Hanford, Charboneau said. That river corridor work included placing six out of nine former production reactors in interim safe storage in a process called “cocooning;” preserving the B Reactor for historical purposes; remediating more than 1,200 waste sites; removing more than 500 facilities; and consolidating more than 25 cubic meters of radioactive sludge in containers in Hanford’s K West Basin.

   Going forward, a few projects will remain to be completed along the river corridor, according to Charboneau. That includes remediation of the waste site under Building 324 and demolition of the building; remediation of the 618-10 and 618-11 burial grounds; and transport of sludge from the K West Basin to the Central Plateau for eventual treatment.

   “We recognize that the Columbia River is a gem, not just for the state of Washington but for the whole country,” EM Deputy Assistant Secretary for Site Restoration Mark Gilbertson said.