Part 4 of 5 Parts (Please read Parts 1, 2 and 3 first)
     The DoE has made significant progress in transferring the cesium and strontium capsules to dry storage in recent years. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company is one of the main environmental cleanup contractors at Hanford. In August of 2019, they completed the designs needed to modify the WESF for the removal of the capsules. In March of 2020, crews began fabricating the necessary equipment for loading the capsules into sleeves, transferring the sleeves to the casks and moving the casks outside to the storage pad. A team had cleaned and painted part of the WESF to prepare for the loading crane. At the nearby Maintenance and Storage Facilities, workers were constructing a mock-up of the transfer system so operators could be trained. However, COVID-19 pandemic temporarily shut down work at the WESF.
     During the pandemic lockdown, employees continued to work remotely with technical and design reviews and nuclear-safety assessments. Hanford is currently in a phased pandemic reopening. CH2M Hill workers recently broke ground for construction of the outdoor storage pad and they have restarted work on the mock-up facility. Intermech is a construction firm owned by Emcor. Last October, the DoE awarded Intermech a five million six-hundred thousand dollar contract to construct a reinforced-concrete pad surrounded by two chain link fences along with necessary utility infrastructure and a heavy-duty road that connects the WESF with the storage pad.
     Unfortunately, the plans for fiscal year 2021 which began in October are less certain. In its budget request submitted to Congress in February, the DoE requested that the Hanford annual cleanup budget be reduced from two and a half billion dollars to one billion eight hundred thousand dollars. The budget request did not include any funding for WESF alternations and storage work. This eliminated the eleven million dollars allocated for such work in this year’s budget. In the meantime, the budget request asked that funding for the tank-waste vitrification project be raised from fifteen million dollars to fifty million dollars. Under the triparty agreement, the DoE is required to begin glassification of Hanford low-level waste by 2023.
      David Reeploeg of the Tri-City Development Council advocacy group said that if the budget cuts are approved, that will make it more difficult for the capsule-transfer project to stay on track. He also said that “we think WESF is a top priority, too. Considering that the potential consequences of an event there are so significant, we want those capsules out of the pool and into dry-cask storage as quickly as possible.”
     In 2017, a tunnel that runs from a reactor to the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant partially collapsed. This exposed highly radioactive materials that had been sealed into the tunnel. Hanford officials had been aware that the tunnel had structural problems since the 1970s. Ultimately, it was determined that no radioactive materials had been released into the air and no Hanford workers were injured. In a February 2020 report, the Government Accountability Office said that the DoE had not done enough to prevent such an incident. Reeploeg stated that the failure of another aging Hanford facility should have been a wake-up call for the DoE.
Please read Part 5 next