From humble beginnings in a garage, Petersen, Inc., has grown into a manufacturing and machining company that prides itself on complex fabrications, quality control and continuous improvement—including building critical equipment that will help treat nuclear waste and protect the environment.
“The melters are the heart of the Low-Activity Waste Facility at WTP,” said Frank Salaman, WTP procurements and subcontracts manager for Bechtel National Inc., the prime contractor designing, building and commissioning the plant. “We entrusted this crucial work to Petersen, and they built two nuclear industry melters, the largest in the world, to rigorous quality standards. Petersen has outstanding dedication to quality and customer service.”
The WTP project, also called the Vit Plant, will use a process called vitrification to safely treat a portion of 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste generated at Hanford during the Manhattan Project and Cold War. Most of the waste stored in Hanford’s underground tanks is low-activity waste, which will be mixed with silica and other glass-forming materials and heated to 2,100 degrees in one of the two melters. Vitrification encases the waste in glass, which is then poured into stainless steel containers for disposal.
Petersen has built two of the incredibly complex melters that will be used at WTP for Bechtel, the prime contractor designing, building and commissioning the plant for the Department of Energy. Petersen, Inc. is also contracted by Bechtel to manufacture the containers, called Immobilized Low-Activity Waste containers, that will be used to dispose of the waste. One hundred of the 640 containers have been delivered to WTP in the past year. The company is also building a third, or spare, melter for Bechtel, and each melter has a design life of at least five years.
The melters are massive—31 feet long, 22 feet wide and 16 feet tall—and weigh 350,000 pounds each. They are so intricate that the specifications for each melter included approximately 1,200 engineering drawings. Due to their complexity, each melter takes two to three years to build, said Rob Despain, vice president of business development at Petersen Inc. They were delivered to WTP in 2010, and later this year the first melter will be heated up as part of the commissioning process.
“We have experience with high-temperature, high-alloy steels so we are familiar with high-temperature products,” Despain said. “We also have an incredibly robust quality control system and talented team members with eons of experience. When we build a melter, we concentrate on one drawing at a time and it touches everyone. The entire team is involved.”
Since their beginning in 1961, Petersen Inc. has grown to two facilities with 1.3 million square feet and 500 employees located in Ogden, Utah, and Pocatello, Idaho. Despain credits three things for the company’s success: employee ownership, the Petersen Operating Way, and Going BIG, an initiative started by CEO Mark Jenkins several years ago.
“Petersen is 100-percent employee owned, and that makes a difference,” Despain said. “Everyone has skin in the game.”
The team utilizes the Petersen Operating Way, which touches all aspects of operations, to build technically challenging projects such as the melters for WTP, which had intense testing, inspection and acceptance criteria.
“We work on continuous improvement,” Despain said. “Even though we’ve been doing this a long time, we work every day to refine our process. The Petersen Operating Way is the way we operate, and it encompasses everything from procedures to how we deal with cleanliness and the way we process material.”
In addition to a culture of continuous improvement, Petersen believes in Going BIG, an appropriate name for the company that manufactured the largest melters in the world.
“Going BIG means ‘Begin in Gratitude,’” Despain said. “We begin our meetings with a safety share but we also share what we’re grateful for. It can be anything from someone’s child who graduated from high school to how a coworker helped with a challenging issue.”
The gratitude extends to working with Bechtel at WTP.
“It’s been fascinating to understand the mission and goals of WTP and what they’re trying to achieve,” Despain said. “We’re proud to be a contributor. We’re grateful to work with people who are technically superior like Bechtel.
“Our motto is ‘A winning combination.’ We feel Petersen and Bechtel are a winning combination, and we’re grateful to be helping make history.”
Petersen, Inc. is set to deliver the final containers in October 2022 and the spare melter in summer 2022.