SPOKANE, Wash. — Costs to clean up a massive nuclear weapons complex in Washington state are usually expressed in the hundreds of billions of dollars and involve decades of work. But one project on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is progressing at a much lower price. The federal government is moving forward with the “cocooning” of eight plutonium production reactors at Hanford that will place them in a state of long-term storage to allow radiation inside to dissipate for decades until they can be dismantled and buried. “It’s relatively non-expensive,” Mark French, a U.S. Department of Energy manager, said of cocooning. “The cost of dismantling and demolishing the reactor core would be extremely expensive and put workers at risk.”
The federal government built nine nuclear reactors at Hanford to make plutonium for atomic bombs during World War II and the Cold War. The site along the Columbia River contains America’s most significant quantity of radioactive waste. The reactors are now shut down and sit like cement fortresses near the southeastern Washington of Richland. Six have already been wrapped for long-term storage, and two more are headed in that direction. The ninth reactor was turned into a museum as part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park. While World War II ended in 1945 and the Cold War ended in 1989, the United States is still paying billions of dollars per year to dispose of the nuclear waste produced by the atomic weapons that played a significant role in ending those conflicts.
The most considerable expense is dealing with a massive volume of liquid wastes left over from the production of plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons. While the liquid wastes stored in 177 underground tanks will take decades of work and hundreds of billions of dollars to clean, efforts to secure the nine plutonium reactors are much closer to completion. French said that the last two reactors, shut down in 1970 and 1971, are about to enter the cocooning stage when they are covered with steel and cement to prevent radioactivity from escaping into the environment.
The cocoons are expected to last about 75 years. By this time, the radioactivity inside will have dramatically decreased, and French said there would presumably be a plan for the final disposition of the remaining parts. Every five years, workers enter the reactor building to make sure there are no leaks or rodent or bird infestations, he said. Cleanup of Hanford, which has about 11,000 employees and is half the size of Rhode Island, started in the late 1980s and now costs about $2.5 billion per year. Technical issues, lack of funding, lawsuits from state regulators, worker exposure to radiation, and turnover of contractors on the complex job have slowed the work.
But the handling of the old reactors is a bright spot. The nine reactors — c Reactor, C Reactor, D Reactor, DR Reactor, F Reactor, H Reactor, K-East Reactor, K-West Reactor, and N Reactor — were built from 1943 through 1965. They were constructed next to the Columbia River because of the abundant hydropower and cooling water the reactors need during operation. All have been cocooned except K-East and K-West. Work on covering the K-East reactor has already started and should be finished by 2023, French said. Work on the K-West reactor is scheduled for completion in 2026.
The cocoon plan for K-East and K-West is basically to construct steel buildings around them; Each tower is 158 feet (48.2 meters) long, 151 feet (46 meters) wide, and 123 feet (37.5 meters) tall, French said. The two steel buildings will cost less than $10 million each. The government also operated five plutonium production reactors at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Those are also shut down, although several reactor buildings are being used to store radioactive materials. French said future generations would decide the eight Hanford reactors’ final disposition. They will likely be dismantled and buried in the central area of the Hanford site, away from the river.
Robots may be deployed in the future” for that work, French said. Hanford watchdogs generally agree with this process, said Tom Carpenter, the Seattle-based watchdog group Hanford Challenge director. “Nobody is raising any concerns about cocooning,” Carpenter said. “We’re all worried about the tank waste that needs immediate and urgent attention.” The bigger question is whether future generations will be willing to pay the massive costs of Hanford cleanup, he said. Carpenter said the estimated cost to clean up the tank wastes at the Hanford site completely is around $660 billion.
“It’s rather grim. It’s multigenerational,” he said. “This will cost more than anyone thought possible,” Carpenter said of the tank and other wastes dumped into the ground at Hanford. “It’s a hidden cost of the (nuclear) buildup.” By then, there might be more significant budget concerns, such as dealing with the effects of climate change, Carpenter said. The most intriguing old reactor is the B Reactor, the first one built during World War II. It will not be wrapped, and tourists can visit the national historical park. B Reactor, which shut down in 1968, was cleaned up enough to allow some 10,000 tourists to visit each year and learn the history of Hanford. It has been designated a National Historic Landmark. Plutonium from Hanford’s B Reactor was used to test the world’s first atomic bomb in July 1945. Called the Trinity Test, the bomb was blown up in the New Mexico desert. Hanford plutonium was also used for the bomb dropped over Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945.
