Plutonium Finishing Plant
After the war ended, the Los Alamos Laboratory moved to divest itself of production activities in order to devote itself to research.
Pit production ended in 1965, when the Atomic Energy Commission announced that henceforth this work would be undertaken at the Rocky Flats Site.
A serious accident at the 242-Z Waste Treatment Facility in 1976, when the contents of a glove box containing americium and plutonium exploded, seriously injuring an operator, Harold McCluskey.
This accident prompted a series of reviews and evaluations that led to the 1978 Department of Energy decision to close most of the Plutonium Finishing Plant's facilities.
During World War II, the Manhattan Project built the Hanford Engineer Works (HEW) to produce plutonium for use in atomic bombs.
This was dried out, packaged in containers, and shipped to the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos Laboratory, where it was made into metallic plutonium and then formed into hemispheres for use in nuclear weapons.
[7] The new operator of the HEW, General Electric, was asked to design a new facility that would handle the rest of the plutonium finishing process.
[4][5][8] On 1 January 1947, the Hanford Site, along with the other nuclear weapons production facilities, passed to the control of the newly established Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).
[4][5][9] In December 1946, a representative from General Electric visited the plutonium finishing and fabricating facility at the Defense Production (DP) West Building at the Los Alamos Laboratory to study its operation.
Company representatives paid Los Alamos a second visit in the spring of 1947, and a design feasibility report was issued in July.
Negative air pressure was supposed to prevent airborne contamination, but samples taken in the processing area and the analytical laboratory were high enough to compel the operators to wear gas masks.
[15] The high production volume tended to saturate the air filters, with the result that a daily average of 18 microcuries (670 kBq) of plutonium was detected in stack releases in July 1957.
[21] At midnight on 31 December 1965, General Electric handed over management of the Hanford Site to chemical processing facilities, including the Plutonium Finishing Plant, to Isochem.
[21] The Reagan administration initiated a nuclear arms build-up in 1989, and the Department of Energy (which succeeded the ERDA in 1977) restarted Hanford's PUREX plant.
The laboratories studied ways to analyze and stabilize the 8,000 containers of plutonium-bearing scrap that had been stored in the Plutonium Finishing Plant.
The feed materials for the process slag and crucible fragments, scrap powders from the RMA line and oxidized plutonium turnings.
A semiworks demonstrated the feasibility of the process, albeit recovering uranium instead of plutonium, and the design of a permanent facility was completed by October 1953.
Worse, radioactive materials began building up in hard-to-access nooks and crannies, and radiation levels inexorably climbed.
From June 1958 on, the Plutonium Finishing Plant began to store rather than bury solid wastes in anticipation that an incinerator would be built.
By the end of 1959, the 216-Z-9 Crib, a 20-foot (6.1 m) deep underground cavern southeast of the 234-5Z Building where aqueous wastes were stored, had accumulated 14,638 grams of plutonium.
The accident prompted a series of reviews and evaluations that led to the DOE decision to close most of the Plutonium Finishing Plant facilities.
The AEC considered sending scrap to the Rocky Flats Site for processing, but in view of the potential safety hazards and the difficulty of properly accounting for material, approval was granted.
It was also much safer because instead of relying on administrative controls, it used geometrically favorable equipment in which a concentration of plutonium sufficient to cause a criticality event was impossible.
Four main glove boxes were located on the first two floors with access to dissolver pots, hot plates, condensers and furnaces.
Solvent extraction was accomplished by remote operation in the large central cell known as the canyon with a solution of tributyl phosphate and carbon tetrachloride.
Nitric acid and hydroxylamine (NH2OH) was then used to separate the product in the form of plutonium nitrate, which was concentrated and then sent to the RMA and RMC lines for processing.
A long period of clean up, maintenance and upgrade followed before the Plutonium Reclamation Facility restarted on 1 January 1984 and ran until 18 November 1984.
Plans were prepared to use mining equipment to remove the top layer of soil and leach out the plutonium with a mixture of nitric and hydrofluoric acids.
[48] Some 238 large pieces of contaminated equipment, including glove boxes and fume hoods, and approximately 50 plutonium processing tanks, were removed.
[52] The Department of Energy's PFP Closure Project intended to have the entire facility cleaned and destroyed down to a concrete slab in 2017,[53] with all contaminated materials moved to other sites.
