Hanford Crews Nearly Ready To Seal Up Tunnel With Grout
Listen
Crews at the Hanford Site in southeast Washington state are running through rehearsals and last minute details. In early October, they’ll begin pouring grout, a kind of thin cement, into a partially collapsed tunnel full of highly contaminated radioactive waste.
“Tunnel 1” is connected to the PUREX plant, a mothballed plutonium processing factory. This past spring, the train tunnel partially collapsed causing an emergency at Hanford.
Now, the government has hired a contractor to fill the tunnel up with grout to stabilize it and keep it from collapsing further
This diagram shows how metal boxes are installed in the area of the tunnel that was breached and then filled with sand. The grout will run through the metal boxes in pipes to fill the tunnel. CREDIT CH2M HILL PLATEAU REMEDIATION COMPANY
It’s a major operation. The tunnel will take about 600 trucks of grout and about one month to fill up. It will all happen at night so the trucks don’t get stuck in traffic.
Workers have installed pipes that run down into the tunnel and a scaffold over the tunnel they call “the bridge.”
The contractor doing the work, CH2M HILL Plateau Remediation Company, said the grout mixture will be warm, but not at temperatures that will be trouble for the radioactive waste.
Critics of the plan worry that the federal government will never remove all this grout and the radioactive waste it encapsulates. They don’t want it to become a near-surface radioactive waste dump.
9(MDAyNTQ1NzQ1MDEyMjk0OTcxNTI4MzljZQ001))
Related Stories:
Workforce training program to offer professional development for caretakers
A pilot apprenticeship program for caretakers may soon help more people develop workforce skills.
How is the implementation of residential zoning changes going in Tacoma?
The city of Tacoma loosened restrictions on what kinds of housing can be built in its neighborhoods. Now, people can build duplexes, triplexes and other multi-unit dwellings in areas that used to be only for single-family homes.
The city’s Home in Tacoma initiative was implemented to help address the region’s housing crisis. The flexibility of more units on single lots is meant to vary the kinds of homes people can rent or buy. By doing so, the city hopes that will decrease costs.
A ‘perfect’ season for Washington’s sweet cherries turns sour because of deportation fears
Cherry growers say the threat of deportations under President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is keeping the migrant workforce they rely on this time of year from showing up to work. They describe an increasingly urgent labor crisis that could leave cherries rotting in the field, and farmers holding the bill.
