Oregon Public Broadcasting

The scale of operations at the Hanford Site, scene of a multi-billion-dollar cleanup of a half-century of accumulated hazardous waste, cannot fail to impress.

Even the vocabulary there evokes the gargantuan, the muscular, the toxic. Hard heels. Chemical baths. Canyons. Ocean liners. Plutonium.

It is, its keepers boast, the largest, most complex cleanup site in the world. It is measured in decades, hundreds of square miles and billions of dollars.

Much of the cleanup work is done: mothballed reactors, demolished buildings, contaminated soil dug up by the ton and deposited in a sealed landfill. But much is left to accomplish. The site will be active until 2050, according to a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Energy.

The pace of operations accelerated with the infusion in 2009 of about $1.9 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the federal spending plan aimed at stimulating the struggling economy. One contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, made what it describes as significant progress, using $12.6 million to create technology that increases sixfold its ability to move 56 million gallons of the world’s worst toxic sludge.

As the last Recovery Act money was spent this year, Hanford contractors planned 1,985 employee layoffs as a result. In August, the U.S. Department of Energy authorized another 1,100 contractor layoffs because of anticipated cuts to the federal budget. Congress so far has not passed a budget for fiscal year 2012, which began this month.

Washington River Protection Solutions, for example, requested $520 million for its share of the cleanup in the coming year. A House version of the budget allocates $408 million, the Senate version $467 million. Neither has been reconciled, leaving the prospect of a continuing resolution that allocates Washington River Protection Solutions $397 million, said Jerry Holloway, communications manager for the company.

As a result, the company announced plans to lay off 475 employees, its share of the 1,100 total. In August, it laid off 19 employees; an undisclosed number lose their jobs Monday, Holloway said Wednesday.

Obviously, reducing the workforce means a “reduction in the amount of work we can accomplish,” Holloway said.

 Washington River Protection Solutions specializes in tank waste, one of three realms at Hanford, and one of the most technically challenging.

“It's some nasty, nasty stuff in a nasty environment,” said Energy Department spokesman Rich Buel.

By remote control

At Hanford from 1943 until 1989, World War II through the Cold War, the United States produced the plutonium that gives the nuclear and thermonuclear arsenal its punch. Hanford supplied the material for the only plutonium-fueled nuclear weapon ever employed in anger, the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. Throughout its working life, Hanford received uranium at its 300 Area and fashioned it into aluminum-clad fuel rods. Deeper into the 586-square-mile site, at nine reactors erected along the Columbia River, the fuel rods went cold into processing tubes, underwent a controlled chain reaction and came out the back end, hot.

From there, the rods went to one of six long, tall, gray and featureless buildings dubbed “canyons” or “ocean liners.” Moving from one end to another, through successive chemical baths, the uranium broke down into a slurry, from which the plutonium was extracted and formed into pucks. Left behind was a chemically toxic, radioactive soup that drained into underground carbon-steel storage tanks and was, at least in the hurried days of world war, forgotten.

“They were designed to put waste in, not take it out,” said Mike Berriochoa, a senior communications specialist with Washington River Protection Solutions.

Those tanks, 177 in all, held 56 million gallons of waste. Most, 149, are single-shelled; 28 are double-shelled. Sixty-seven of the single-shelled tanks have leaked, contaminating the soil and possibly the groundwater underneath.

Over the years, the sludge hardened and stratified into a salty cake lining the tank, a “hard heel” along the bottom and something between the consistency of sludge and peanut butter in between. The cleanup plan calls for emptying the contents of single-shelled tanks into double-shelled tanks, then piping the whole mess into a $12 billion vitrification plant as far as eight miles away and turning it into glass for disposal.

Removing that material is a challenge. The tanks lay 10 feet underground with only a pipe 12 inches in diameter for access.

“Inside is a lethal environment,” said Berriochoa. “The work must be done by remote control.”

Game changer

With previous technology, Washington River Protection Solutions cleaned out one tank per year. This week it brought out new technology called the Mobile Arm Retrieval System, or MARS, it hopes will clear as many as six tanks per year. The system uses a series of high-pressure nozzles to stream wastewater in jets and scour caked-on waste, then rake it into a place where it can be safely pumped out.

MARS was developed over two years and tested for another year, partly in a tank mockup at Hanford. Workers in September installed the apparatus in an actual 250,000-gallon waste tank, rigged it, tested it and prepared the final documentation. Last week, it developed an instrumentation glitch, but Berriochoa said it may be in service by Friday.

“It's considered a game changer in the way we get large volumes of waste out of our tanks,” he said. “It means we only have to go into the tank one time to get the waste out.”

To install the machine, workers cut a 55 inch-diameter hole on top of the tank, inside it installed a riser — a sleeve on which the equipment rides — connected hydraulic and electrical lines and covered the hole, all by remote control and from behind walls shielding workers from radiation streaming from the tank, Berriochoa said.

The waste pumped from each single-hulled tank is pumped into a double-hulled tank several hundred feet away. Once one tank farm is emptied, the contractors move to the next, moving farther away from the $12 billion treatment plant now under construction. That's the Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, designed by Bechtel National Inc. to turn the waste into glass, or vitrify it.

The treatment plant, another first-time engineering story, is scheduled to come on line in 2019. Nine years ago, Bechtel estimated the plant could be built for about $5 billion and come on line in 2007.

Read more on eastoregonian.com.