Project progress update (as of July 25, 2010)
Total project: 56% complete
- 81% design complete
- 55% procurement complete
- 52% construction complete
Pretreatment Facility
World’s largest radioactive chemical separations facility
- 80% design complete
- 43% procurement complete
- 32% construction complete
High-Level Waste Vitrification Facility
Turns high-level waste into glass
- 85% design complete
- 58% procurement complete
- 29% construction complete
Low-Activity Waste Vitrification Facility
Turns low-activity waste into glass
- 92% design complete
- 79% procurement complete
- 62% construction complete
Analytical Laboratory
Ensures glass meets regulatory requirements
- 82% design complete
- 71% procurement complete
- 66% construction complete
Balance of Facilities — 20 support facilities and underground utilities
Vast infrastructure to support operations
- 82% design complete
- 44% procurement complete
- 59% construction complete
A bit of perspective
- Plant construction requires more than 257,000 cubic yards of concrete—enough to fill 25,700 concrete trucks. If laid bumper-to-bumper, the concrete trucks would stretch 146 miles.
- Plant construction requires moving more than 2,341,800 cubic yards of earth—enough to fill 18 Olympic swimming pools like the ones used in the 2000 Sydney Games. In fact the amount of WTP earthwork is 10 times the earthwork completed for the University of Washington’s Husky Stadium.
- Plant construction requires more than 4,281,000 feet of electrical cable; if laid end-to-end, would stretch more than 811 miles—more than the distance from Seattle, Wash, to San Francisco, Calif.
- Plant construction requires more than 980,000 feet of piping; if laid end-to-end, it would stretch more than 185 miles—more than the distance from Seattle, Wash, to Portland, Ore.
- Plant construction requires more than 34,600 tons of structural steel, enough to build the equivalent of three-and-a-half of Paris’ Eiffel Tower (the Eiffel Tower is made of 9,547 tons of wrought iron).