Take a look at huge nuclear submarine compartments’ journey to Tri-Cities resting place

KENNEWICK – Two more nuclear submarine reactor compartments were floated by barge through the Tri-Cities in October on their way to the Hanford nuclear site.

The U.S. Navy does not make its shipment schedule public, but some Washington and Oregon residents spotted the reactor compartments, minus their nuclear fuel, on their 700-mile journeys by barge in October.

They floated from the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard at Bremerton down the Washington coast and then up the Columbia River to north Richland.

At the Port of Benton in Richland the compartments from the USS City of Corpus Christi and USS Portsmouth submarines were offloaded and hauled to Trench 94 in the center of Hanford.

The Department of Energy said they were the 143rd and 144th reactor compartment packages shipped by the Navy from the Puget Sound to Hanford since 1986, when Trench 94 received its first shipment for disposal.

Trench 94 – which is now open but eventually will be covered – is more than 50 feet deep and about the size of two football fields.

From the Port of Benton dock, the reactor compartments were loaded by crane onto a 30-by-60-foot “land transporter” with 320 wheels to be pulled by large tractors for their 25-mile overland trips to the burial trench.

The USS Portsmouth was decommissioned in 2004 and the USS City of Corpus Christi was decommissioned in 2017. Both were 361-foot-long Los Angeles-class submarines.

The retired vessels were sent to the waterfront Puget Sound Naval Shipyard & Intermediate Maintenance Facility for recycling, with defueled reactor compartments then being sent to Hanford.

The Hanford site in Eastern Washington adjacent to Richland was used from World War II through the Cold War to produce nearly two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.