Hanford cleanup goes well; 1 project finished

RICHLAND – Workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation have made progress on one cleanup project and completed another at the highly contaminated site, the U.S. Department of Energy said Wednesday.

Finished was an 11-year effort to upgrade pipes that will carry highly radioactive waste.

The progress was announced during a visit by the agency’s new deputy secretary, Clay Sell, who was seeing Hanford for the first time.

“We are naturally very proud of these accomplishments, and we’re pleased with what they represent for the future of cleanup work here at Hanford,” Sell said.

Workers at the 586-square-mile site have been working since October 2003 to retrieve deteriorating drums and boxes of radioactive waste from burial grounds. Some of that material is believed to be highly radioactive transuranic waste, which can take millions of years to decay.

Under the Tri-Party Agreement, the 1989 cleanup pact signed by the Energy Department, state Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, workers must complete the removal of all suspected transuranic waste – the equivalent of about 75,000 drums – by the end of 2010.

Included in the pact are interim deadlines for each year of the project. Workers met this year’s milestone five months ahead of schedule by retrieving more than 13,500 drums by late July, said Keith Klein, manager of the Energy Department’s Richland operations office.

The drums were buried in the 1970s and ‘80s.

Progress on that project significantly reduces risk to the environment, Klein said.

“Obviously, the work is going to get harder,” Klein said. “It further underscores the need to get this waste out of the ground at Hanford.”

Workers also celebrated the completion of a project to upgrade miles of pipes linking 177 underground tanks. The tanks hold an estimated 53 million of gallons of highly radioactive waste less than 10 miles from the Columbia River.

Waste from 149 aging single-shell tanks, some of which are known to have leaked, is to be transferred to 28 newer, double-walled tanks. However, pipes between the tanks, installed in the 1970s, also had only a single-wall construction that did not meet current regulations governing hazardous waste.

About 14 miles of stainless steel pipes were encased in a fiberglass outer jacket with a leak detection system. In addition, thousands of feet of pipe were upgraded within the tank farms themselves and leading to a new waste treatment plant.

Workers completed the pipe project in mid-July – just past the June 30 deadline – but brought it in for $400 million, about $29 million under budget.

U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., whose district includes the Hanford site, was on hand for the celebration Wednesday. Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire also sent a letter of congratulations to workers.

“These achievements represent meaningful progress in reducing long-term environmental risks on the Hanford reservation,” the letter said. “And they are particularly good news at a time of some uncertainty over the future of this project.”

The Energy Department announced recently plans to scale back construction on the new waste treatment plant amid soaring costs, seismic issues and construction problems. The plant, already about one-third built, will turn much of the waste into glasslike logs for permanent disposal in a nuclear waste repository.

The state has raised concerns about the slowdown, fearing cleanup at the Hanford site could be delayed.

“I know that the long history of the Hanford cleanup project has had its fair share of troubles, litigation and shifting deadlines,” Sell said. “It is my hope that those days are behind us, and that we can continue to move the cleanup of Hanford steadily down the path toward completion. The successes we celebrate today further our belief that progress is being made here, all across this vast and diverse site.”

For 40 years, the Hanford nuclear site made plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal, beginning as part of the top-secret Manhattan project to build the atomic bomb. Today, Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the country, with cleanup costs estimated between $50 billion and $60 billion. The work is scheduled to be completed by 2035.