Crews at the Hanford site have successfully extracted a 10-ton, two-story-tall glovebox from a plutonium processing plant, the Department of Energy announced last week.
DOE described the box as one of the largest and most complex pieces of equipment to be removed from the Hanford Plutonium Finishing Plant. To date, contractor CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Co. has taken 177 of 232 gloveboxes from the 60-plus buildings of the PFP. Also known as the Z-Plant, it processed a plutonium nitrate solution from Hanford reactors into oxides and solid "buttons" used for weapons production between 1949 and 1989.
“This is one of the most complex gloveboxes we have worked on to date. It took a lot of preparation and a dedicated support team to safely execute the work. The PFP work teams are very disciplined and exceptional in accomplishing this high-risk work safely and in a timely matter,” DOE federal project director Larry Romine said in a release.
After practicing on a full-scale mockup box, a crew isolated the real thing from electrical and ventilation systems, decontaminated it as much as possible, then disassembled it in order to get it out of the building. The box will be further broken down at Perma-Fix Northwest in Richland, Wa., then disposed of at Hanford's Environmental Disposal Facility and at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.