RICHLAND, Wash. – Workers with EM’s Richland Operations Office and its contractors made progress this year in several areas of Hanford site cleanup that helped protect employees, the public, environment, and Columbia River.

   Active cleanup has been completed on 479 square miles of the 586-square-mile site. More than 80 percent of cleanup along the Columbia River has been completed. The river runs through the site and is near nuclear reactors and uranium fuel fabrication and research facilities that once operated.

   Work to prepare the site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) — formerly Hanford’s main plutonium production facility and today, considered the most hazardous facility on the site – for demolition is in its final, most challenging stages.

More than 11 billion gallons of groundwater have been treated across the site to reduce areas of contamination and the concentration of contaminants in groundwater.

   The Richland Operations Office and its contractors completed the following major cleanup activities this year:

• Removed the 1,082-ton core of a nuclear test reactor and a 1,153-ton vault that once held waste tanks from an area of the site where workers fabricated more than 20 million pieces of uranium fuel for reactors and operated research facilities. Known as the 300 Area, more than 200 facilities have been cleaned out and torn down. Only a former research facility with high levels of contamination under the building awaits cleanup there today;
• Reached 16 million tons of cleanup debris and contaminated soil disposed of in the site’s permitted landfill for low-level radioactive waste, known as the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility. More than 15 million tons of the waste came from areas near the Columbia River, from demolition and cleanup of hundreds of contaminated buildings and sites where solid waste was buried or soil was contaminated;
• Finished clearing the largest source of groundwater contamination along the Columbia River, with the removal of approximately 1 billion cubic yards of soil near two of Hanford’s former nuclear reactors — a large source of the contaminant chromium;
• Began final cleanup of one of the most challenging rooms in the PFP. Removed eight support facilities around the plant’s main building where large equipment can operate in the next two years to demolish the main plant; and
• Exceeded annual goals for removing contamination from groundwater across the site ahead of schedule and pumped a record volume of water through treatment facilities to remove contamination, with more than 130 tons of contaminants removed since treatment began in the mid-1990s.

Much of the work assigned to the Richland Operations Office and its contractors remains to be completed in the coming decades, including finishing the last two years of cleanup in PFP so the plant can be torn down.

   Nearly 2,000 capsules of highly radioactive cesium and strontium need to be removed from water-filled storage basins and placed in dry storage.

   Approximately 37 cubic yards of radioactive sludge needs to be removed from a water-filled basin near the Columbia River. Hundreds of former production facilities, including former chemical reprocessing facilities and sites, where solid waste is buried or soil is contaminated, are on the list for cleanup.

   Decades of treatment will be required to reduce contamination in groundwater across the site to levels considered safe.

   Video footage of the cleanup activities completed in the last year is available on the Hanford Site’s YouTube channel: