Tri-Cities firm awarded $19 million contracts for work at Hanford nuclear reservation
A Richland company has been awarded contracts worth nearly $19 million for Hanford nuclear reservation construction work.
Fowler General Construction will work on three projects that will be needed when the Hanford site’s $17 billion vitrification plant begins turning some radioactive tank waste into a stable glass form for disposal by the end of 2023.
Hanford has 56 million gallons of radioactive and other hazardous chemical waste in underground tanks. The waste was generated during World War II and the Cold War when the site produced two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons program.
Washington River Protection Solutions, a Hanford contractor owned by Amentum and Atkins, awarded the subcontracts to Fowler.
A subcontract worth $5.3 million will cover building a 17,600-square-foot office building at the 222-S Laboratory in the center of Hanford. It should be completed next year.
The lab now is used to determine what wastes can be combined in Hanford’s underground storage tanks and to help plan how workers can best be protected while working at specific tanks.
In the future it will be used to support the Hanford vitrification plant.
The other two construction projects, costing $13.5 million, will upgrade Hanford’s Effluent Treatment Facility, which treats water contaminated with low levels of radioactive waste.
Fowler will expand the existing station for tanker trucks delivering waste and build a second, enclosed station to help handle increased waste deliveries when the vit plant is operating.
Low activity radioactive waste turned into glass logs at the vitrification plant will be disposed of at a lined landfill in central Hanford, the Integrated Disposal Facility.
A leachate collection system at the bottom of the landfill will collect contaminated water used for dust suppression and rain and snow melt.
About 1.2 million gallons of the contaminated water is expected to be trucked annually from the landfill to the Effluent Treatment Facility for processing.
Fowler also will design and build a system at the Effluent Treatment Facility to remove a hazardous chemical, acetonitrile, from liquid waste coming from the vitrification plant. The vitrification process uses acetonitrile, which becomes part of the secondary waste stream that must be treated for disposal.
Fowler General Construction, which was established in 2004, has done previous work at Hanford, including remodeling the 222-S Laboratory, and was awarded a $13 million contract in late 2020 to build a water treatment plant at the site.
It also built Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Discovery Hall.