Richland, Wash. — Recently, employees and subcontractors who work in the Hanford Waste Treatment Plant project offices reached more than 16 million hours — over 5 years — without an injury resulting in a lost workday.
“This is a tremendous accomplishment for our office employees and demonstrates their continued commitment to working safely and going home injury free,” Frank Russo, project director for the Vit Plant, said.
More than 1,500 engineers and other professionals work in Vit Plant offices, with the majority located in Richland, Wash. A couple hundred employees also work out of satellite offices in Oakland, Calif., and Frederick, Md.
In total, nearly 3,400 employees compose the Vit Plant workforce, including 1,900 skilled union craft, subcontractors, engineers and professionals who are located at the 65-acre construction site. Collectively, Vit Plant employees have exceeded 4 million hours without an injury resulting in a lost workday.
“The Vit Plant is nearly 55 percent constructed and 60 percent complete overall,” Russo said. “We are finishing civil construction — concrete and steel — and beginning to shift our focus to bulk commodity and major equipment installations. Our focus on safety and achieving zero accidents, however, remains.”
Bechtel National, Inc. is designing and building the world’s largest radioactive waste treatment plant for the U.S. Department of Energy at the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington state. The $12.2 billion Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, also known as the “Vit Plant,” will immobilize the radioactive liquid waste currently stored in 177 underground tanks using a process called “vitrification.”
Vitrification involves blending the waste with molten glass and heating it to high temperatures. The mixture is then poured into stainless steel canisters. In this glass form, the waste is stable and impervious to the environment, and its radioactivity will dissipate over hundreds to thousands of years.
The WTP will cover 65 acres with four nuclear facilities — Pretreatment, Low-Activity Waste Vitrification, High-Level Waste Vitrification and Analytical Laboratory — as well as operations and maintenance buildings, utilities and office space.
Construction of the WTP began in 2001 and is now 57 percent complete. Construction is scheduled to be complete in 2016 and operational in 2019.