Workers began unearthing drums of 50-year-old waste at the Department of Energy’s Hanford complex last week from what DOE characterizes as one of the site’s most hazardous burial grounds.
“So far, we’ve removed about 30 drums that contain radioactively contaminated shavings and oil, and miscellaneous debris,” John Darby was quoted as saying in a DOE release Wednesday. An operations manager for contractor Washington Closure Hanford, he is overseeing the work at the 618-10 Burial Ground. “We expect to find up to 2,000 drums containing everything from mildly contaminated clothing and debris to highly radioactive laboratory equipment and liquids.”
In addition to the drums, crews expect to find 94 pipes, each made from five drums welded end-to-end, buried vertically and expected to contain the most radioactive waste. Planning is underway to remove them. The excavation of 618-10 for eventual handling of the waste at Hanford’s Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility follows almost two years of preparation. The project is funded by $57 million from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, also known as the federal stimulus bill.
According to the release, it will take about 18 months to remove the waste, which incomplete records indicate contains high-dose-rate material in addition to a wide range of less-irradiated items like boxes and light fixtures. The waste also includes contaminated metallurgical samples, irradiated fuel element samples and 200 bottles of unidentified liquids recently discovered by crews.
All of the material comes from a period between 1954 and 1963. For more than four decades starting in 1944, several reactors at Hanford produced plutonium for the U.S. military. The process left behind large volumes of waste that DOE has committed to cleaning up at the site along the Columbia River in central Washington.