A 20,000-square-foot Hanford complex that once housed plutonium is coming down.
Last week the Department of Energy and its contractor CH2M Hill began demolishing the vault complex within Hanford’s Plutonium Finishing Plant. The demolition work is expected to be complete early next year. Crews earlier had decontaminated the buildings, which involved the removal of glove boxes and other irradiated equipment.
“Cleaning out and demolishing these structures is a key element of DOE’s vision for completing several major cleanup projects by 2015, and the work keeps us on track to meet a major regulatory milestone to demolish the Plutonium Finishing Plant complex by 2016,” J.D. Dowell, a DOE manager, said in a release.
The vault complex was one of the final stops for plutonium at the Washington state facility, which produced two thirds of the plutonium for nuclear weapons during the Cold War. The high-security vaults once held plutonium “buttons” before they were shipped to facilities that manufactured warheads. The last of Hanford's plutonium was shipped to DOE’s Savannah River facility in South Carolina in 2009.