Preparing for safe and compliant open air demolition at Hanford's plutonium finishing plant - 15100
- CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Company, Richland, Washington (United States)
The Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP), located in the 200 West Area of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Hanford Site, began operations in 1949 and produced plutonium metal during the Cold War. Production was stopped in 1989, the facility was formally shut-down in 1996, and material stabilization completed in 2004. DOE contractor CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Company (CH2M HILL) is tasked with the plant's deactivation, decommissioning, decontamination and demolition, to be completed by September 30, 2016. The project team, partnering with DOE-Richland Operations Office (DOE-RL), is exploring, evaluating and implementing efficiencies to safely and compliantly prepare the facility for demolition. Since 2008, employees have prepared approximately 75 percent of the complex for demolition. More than 90 percent of the 232 glove boxes have been removed from ventilation and more than 80 percent of pencil tank units have been dispositioned. As decontamination, deactivation and removal nears completion on the remaining glove boxes, pencil tanks and other radiological and chemical processing infrastructure, CH2M HILL and DOE-RL are making preparations to demolish PFP itself, a Hazardous Category II nuclear facility (HazCat II). Conventional techniques used to demolish buildings heavily contaminated with radiological hazards typically involve extensive hands-on work to remove Material at Risk (MAR) and decontaminate the building to low levels before conventional demolition techniques can be used to remove the building. A safe and more cost effective approach is packaging MAR located in hard to access areas of the plant and removing it during demolition. That process, combined with affixing remaining contamination to walls, floors and equipment, performing detailed air dispersion modeling before demolition and air monitoring and dust suppression during demolition, will reduce employee risk and is more efficient in demolishing a HazCat II facility. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, Inc., PO Box 27646, 85285-7646 Tempe, AZ (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22822660
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US-19-WM-15100; TRN: US19V0650067575
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: WM2015: Annual Waste Management Symposium, Phoenix, AZ (United States), 15-19 Mar 2015; Other Information: Country of input: France; Available online at: http://archive.wmsym.org/2015/index.html
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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