Hanford’s spent fuel transferred to K West
YAKIMA — Workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation have finished removing spent nuclear fuel from the K East basin, a water-filled pool that has leaked water and sludge into the soil, threatening the Columbia River just 400 yards away.
The last canister of fuel was removed Thursday and transferred to the K West basin for processing, the U.S. Department of Energy announced.
“Emptying this basin is more than just a project milestone — it’s a critical step in risk reduction at Hanford,” Keith Klein, manager of the Energy Department’s Richland operations office, said in a news release.
Moving the roughly 2 million pounds of fuel is the first step in emptying the basin altogether so that it no longer poses a risk to the environment, Klein said.
About 2,100 metric tons of spent fuel, including 4 tons of plutonium, have been stored underwater in the K Basins, two big indoor pools built in the 1950s with a planned use life of 20 years.
Most of the highly radioactive fuel rods came from the N Reactor, which was used to make plutonium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The irradiated uranium fuel in the K Basins represents about 80 percent of the nation’s remaining inventory of spent nuclear fuel.
Removal of the fuel turned out to be difficult work because much of it was badly corroded, said Ron Gallagher, president and chief executive officer of contractor Fluor Hanford.
A computer-control failure on a crane delayed the final removal of fuel from K East basin by two days.
“Now that the fuel canisters are out, we can turn our focus to getting the K East basin ready for demolition,” Gallagher said in a news release.
Last month, workers began removing from the pool’s radioactive sludge, dust, dirt and sloughed material from the basin walls.
The Energy Department missed a legal deadline established under the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement — the legal pact governing cleanup at Hanford — to begin removing the sludge by Dec. 31, 2002. But the agency reached a new agreement with regulators in May.
Under the new agreement, sludge from the K East basin must be removed by Jan. 31, 2006. Sludge from the K West basin must be removed by June 30, 2006.
More than three-fourths of the 50 cubic meters of sludge inside the basins is located in the leak-prone K East basin.
All fuel, debris and water will be taken out of the K East basin, and the basin itself will be removed by March 31, 2007. The other basin will be removed by spring 2009.
The previous plan called for total removal by July 2007.