Each building is 158 feet (48.2 meters) long, 151 feet (46 meters) wide and 123 feet (37.5 meters) tall, French said. The cocoon plan for K-East and K-West is to basically construct steel buildings around them. Work on the K-West reactor is scheduled for completion in 2026. Work on cocooning the K-East reactor has already started and should be finished by 2023, French said. They were constructed next to the Columbia River because of the abundance of hydropower and cooling water needed by the reactors during operation.Īll have been cocooned except K-East and K-West. The nine reactors - called B 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. The work has been slowed by technical issues, lack of funding, lawsuits from state regulators, worker exposure to radiation and turnover of contractors on the complex job.īut the handling of the old reactors is a bright spot. The cocoons are expected to last about 75 years, by which time the radioactivity inside will have dramatically decreased and there presumably will be a plan for final disposition of the remaining parts, French said.Įvery five years, workers enter the reactor building to make sure there are no leaks or rodent or bird infestations, he said.Ĭleanup 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. The last two reactors, shut down in 19, are about to enter the cocooning stage, when they are covered with steel and cement to prevent radioactivity from escaping into the environment, French said. 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. The biggest expense is dealing with a massive volume of liquid wastes left over from the production of plutonium, a key ingredient in nuclear weapons. 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 for the disposal of the nuclear waste produced by the atomic weapons that played a big role in ending those conflicts.
The ninth reactor was turned into a museum as part of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.
Six have already been cocooned for long-term storage, and two more are headed in that direction. The reactors are now shut down and sit like cement fortresses near the southeastern Washington city of Richland. The site along the Columbia River contains America's largest quantity of radioactive waste. The federal government built nine nuclear reactors at Hanford to make plutonium for atomic bombs during World War II and the Cold War. “The cost of trying to dismantle the reactor and demolish the reactor core would be extremely expensive and put workers at risk.” “It’s relatively non-expensive,” Mark French, a manager for the U.S. 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 over a period of decades, until they can be dismantled and buried.
– 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.īut one project on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is progressing at a much lower price.
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