FLUOR HANFORD (FH) MAKES CLEANUP A REALITY IN NEARLY 11 YEARS AT HANFORD Page: 4 of 23
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FLUOR HANFORD MAKES CLEANUP A REALITY IN NEARLY 11 YEARS AT
HANFORD SITE
Michele Gerber, Fluor Hanford
For Nuclear Futures magazine, 2007
TWO-PART SERIES
Part I: Fluor Hanford Changes Cleanup at Hanford Site
For nearly 11 years, Fluor Hanford has been busy cleaning up the legacy of
nuclear weapons production at one of the Department of Energy's (DOE's) major sites in
the United States. As prime nuclear waste cleanup contractor at the vast Hanford Site in
southeastern Washington state, Fluor Hanford has changed the face of cleanup.
When DOE awarded a large waste remediation and site maintenance contract to
Fluor beginning on October 1, 1996, Hanford Site cleanup was primarily a "paper
exercise." The Tri-Party Agreement, officially called the Hanford Federal Facility
Agreement and Consent Order - the edict governing cleanup among the DOE, U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Washington state - was just seven years
old. Milestones mandated in the agreement up until then had required mainly waste
characterization, reporting, and planning, with actual waste remediation activities off in
the future .
Real work, accessing waste "in the field" - or more literally in huge underground
tanks, decaying spent fuel pools, groundwater, hundreds of contaminated facilities, solid
waste burial grounds, and liquid waste disposal sites - began in earnest under Fluor
Hanford. The fruits of labors initiated, completed and/or underway by Fluor Hanford can
today be seen across the site.
Spent nuclear fuel is buttoned up in secure, dry containers stored away from
regional water resources, reactive plutonium scraps are packaged in approved containers,
transuranic (TRU) solid waste is being retrieved from burial trenches and shipped offsite
for permanent disposal, contaminated facilities are being demolished, contaminated
groundwater is being pumped out of aquifers at record rates, and many other inventive
solutions are being applied to Hanford's most intransigent nuclear wastes. (TRU waste
contains more than 100 nanocuries per gram, and contains isotopes higher than uranium
on the Periodic Table of the Elements. A nanocurie is one-billionth of a curie.)
At the same time, Fluor Hanford has dramatically improved safety records, and
cost effectively maintained and streamlined infrastructure and equipment that is
impossibly old and in many cases "extinct" in terms of spare parts and vendor support.
The story of Fluor's achievements at the Hanford Site - the oldest and most productive
plutonium site in the world - is both inspiring and instructive.
Removing Spent Nuclear Fuel from the K Basins
In October 2004, the largest collection of spent fuel in the DOE complex was
removed from wet storage. Fluor Hanford completed removing more than 2,300 tons
(2,100 metric tons {MT]) of irradiated uranium fuel - just over 4.65-million pounds - that
had been stored for as long as 30 years in two indoor pools known as the K Basins. The
fuel, which represented 80 percent of DOE's total spent fuel inventory, sat just one-
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Gerber, M. S. FLUOR HANFORD (FH) MAKES CLEANUP A REALITY IN NEARLY 11 YEARS AT HANFORD, article, May 24, 2007; Richland, Washington. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc877105/m1/4/: accessed April 23, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; crediting UNT Libraries Government Documents Department.