Unusual Decommissioning of Contaminated Facilities at the Savannah River Site - The Demolition of Cooling Towers 285-H and 285-F
- Washington Savannah River Company, Aiken, SC 29808 (United States)
Savannah River Site is an 800-square kilometer (310-square mile) U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) industrial facility located in Aiken, Allendale, and Barnwell Counties in South Carolina. The site is dedicated to environmental cleanup, developing and deploying technologies to support the cleanup mission, processing and storing nuclear materials, and supporting national security missions. The current focus in environmental management is on the cleanup of legacy materials, facilities and wastes left from the Cold War. In 2002 the DOE initiated actions to expedite cleanup focusing on significant risk reduction coupled with reducing costs. SRS published the Savannah River Site Environmental Management Integrated Deactivation and Decommissioning Plan in 2003 which addressed the final disposition and physical end state of all 1,013 Environmental Management facilities on site by the year 2025. Included in this list of facilities are reactors, fabrication facilities, process facilities and the support facilities that were required during the past 50 years. By the end of FY06, over 200 facilities had been decommissioned. This paper describes the demolition of two facilities, cooling towers 285-H and 285-F that were associated with the operation of the process canyons. Because of the circumstances surrounding these decommissions, unique and unusual techniques were safely employed to demolish and remove the cooling towers. Both 285-H and 285-F were safely felled by pulling the columns remotely to weaken the internal portion of the structure so it would collapse inwards into the basin. Cooling tower 285-H fell in less than 1 second after approximately two-thirds of the columns had been broken. See Figure 3 for a photo of 285-H after its collapse. 285-F, which was larger than 285-H, fell in three sections, two cells at a time. Once the towers were felled conventional demolition equipment was used to segregate and remove the debris. All protective measures used to protect surrounding equipment and structures were successful and the basins were cleaned out and returned to service in less than two weeks. The demolition of both cooling towers 285- H and 285-F was completed safely and timely using unconventional means to fell the towers due to structural degradation, height, limited access, radiological and asbestos hazards, and a requirement to protect equipment on all sides of the facility as well as preservation of the basins. During felling operations personnel were required to stay outside the fall zone equivalent to a distance of 150% of the height of the towers. Remote operations outside the fall zone required a tracked vehicle to pull cables attached to the columns in a predetermined sequence so as to fell the tower straight down into the basin. Once the towers fell traditional demolition equipment segregated and removed the waste. Wooden cooling towers of this vintage present a difficult challenge to traditional demolition techniques. Because of the height and potential instability of these types of facilities, considerable effort is placed on reducing the potential energy to a point where heavy equipment can reach safely without endangering the operators. The column-pulling technique chosen for both 285-H and 285-F cooling towers proved to be a safe and efficient method for demolition of these types of facilities.
- Research Organization:
- American Nuclear Society, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, Illinois 60526 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 21144250
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: DD and R 2007: ANS Topical Meeting on Decommissioning, Decontamination, and Reutilization 2007, Chattanooga, TN (United States), 16-19 Sep 2007; Other Information: Country of input: France; Related Information: In: Proceedings of the 2007 ANS Topical Meeting on Decommissioning, Decontamination, and Reutilization - DD and R 2007, 336 pages.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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