CLEANING UP HANFORD

This photo, taken through a grated floor in the K-West Basin, shows fuel rods stored in containers in a giant pool of water under the building. Robotic arms move the material into a container. Eventually, the fuel roads will be placed into multi-canister overpacks (photo at right) for storage. (The Observer/Alice Perry linker).

By Alice Perry Linker

Observer Staff Writer

RICHLAND, Wash. — The massive shovel stood poised above the pit ready to scoop up yards of poisonous dirt.

"Down there, through those chutes, that's where the fuel was discharged," someone on the Hanford Advisory Committee piped up while a group stood above an excavation pit at the F Reactor on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

The committee, made up of representatives from Washington and Oregon, was touring a portion of Hanford's 586 square miles on the banks of the Columbia River. The committee advises federal and state agencies involved in the ongoing cleanup of nuclear and chemical waste at Hanford.

The F Reactor is being decommissioned, a process that involves removing many layers of dirt, gravel and other material. In some areas within the reactor building, the material is so "hot" that robots must do the work.

The reactor, built in 1945 after the bombing on Nagasaki, operated until 1965. It was one of Hanford's nine nuclear reactors cooled with water from the Columbia River.

"We pretty much know what we'll find in there," said Mike Mihalic, a superintendent at the reactor. "We don't expect any surprises."

There have been a number of surprises at Hanford, said Shelley Cimon of La Grande, a member of the advisory board. In some areas near the Columbia River many buried 55-gallon drums full of uranium shavings packed in mineral oil were found a few years ago.

"Nobody knew they were there," Cimon said.

Cleaning, or remediation, at one reactor, the C Reactor, is finished, and within a few months, remediation at F will be completed. The cleaned reactors are outfitted with new roofs of galvanized material with a 50-year warranty, and the buildings are completely encased in concrete and allowed to cool.

"It's called cocooning," Cimon said. "It made sense to leave the buildings and let them sit and cool."

As dangerous and "hot" as the reactors are, the tank farm on a plateau in the center of the reservation is equally toxic. Marked as the 200 area on Hanford maps, the tank farms, next to the decommissioned Purex plutonium processing plant, contain 53 million gallons of high-level nuclear waste. Of the 177 tanks, only 28 have double shells.

The hazardous liquid now stored in tanks eventually will be vitrified — turned into a glass-like material — so that it can be more safely transported to a permanent storage location.

But vitrification is a long and complex process, and the U.S. Department of Energy is building a giant plant near the tank farms to convert the waste.

Plans are for the plant to begin receiving the liquid in 2007 for the project that will hire 900 to 1,000 people to work in the $50 million fortified structure.

The advisory committee's bus drove through the vitrification plant construction site and watched as giant equipment excavated tons of earth to begin the foundation for the plant.

Meanwhile, as the tanks rest partly underground, employees sit inside another building at computers to monitor the automatic pumping of recycled water through the single-shell tanks to cool the radioactive material.

"We have people here 24-7," said an employee of CH2M Hill, the contractor on the tank project.

MILES OF UNDERGROUND TANKS

"There's so much we don't know about this area," Cimon said about the area around the Purex plant. "There are miles of underground lines of tanks strung together, something like a strand of pearls (only they aren't pearls). In the 200 area the only monitoring well is 20 years away."

Underground plumes of chromium, uranium, tritium (a radioactive isotope) and other chemicals are moving slowly from the tank farm area toward the Columbia River. Cimon said that the condition of the ground water is not known.

"The way we're going to work with ground water is still being negotiated, and everybody says that's the most difficult," she said.

In another area of the reservation, thousands of tons of "dirty" soil and debris have been stored in huge 70-foot-deep pits beneath the ground.

The committee watched trucks move to and from a giant pit, the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF), transporting contaminated soil encased in plastic. The trucks dump the bags into the pit, alternating layers of contaminated material with "clean" dirt and gradually filling the pit, much like a garbage landfill operates.

Cimon and Mike Goldstein of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said they are pleased with the progress of remediation, although they said much remains to be done.

"We have tough decisions ahead," Goldstein said.

AWAITING PERMANENT DISPOSAL SITE

The reservation has become a massive cleanup project, but what to do with the waste remains an issue. Cimon said she fears Hanford will become a destination for nuclear waste from other reservations, although the Bush Administration has indicated its preference for the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.

While the nation waits for a permanent disposal site, much of Hanford's waste is being stored on site. Spent nuclear rods rest beneath a large pool of water in a highly secure building known as K West.

The advisory committee, escorted by Hanford employees, passed through two guarded checkpoints at the gates to the K West Basin. Security on the reservation has tightened considerably since the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on New York and Arlington, Va.

The need for security is evident inside the vast building where 2,100 tons of spent fuel rods rest under a giant pool of water circulating in a sealed system inside the building.

"We're extremely proud of what we're doing here," said Jim Matthews, facilities manager at the K Basin.

Nine hundred and fifty people are working on the K Basin remediation project, expected to cost $1.6 billion when it's complete. The cost of maintenance is $100,000 per day. Eventually, the spent fuel will be packed in canisters — multi-canister overpacks — for permanent storage, but until a permanent location is developed, the canisters are stored at Hanford. Of the 400 multi-canister overpacks to be filled and sealed, only 57 are complete, and the rods wait under the water.

Cimon, who has been working with Hanford-related committees for 17 years, fears that priorities will shift and less will be spent on the Hanford project. At best, cleanup will not be finished for another 40 or 50 years, more than a century after the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

— Alice Perry Linker