Hanford plant, Washington

Fermi s atomic pile was just a prototype. For manufacturing bomb plutonium, a plant was built at the tiny village of Hanford in Washington State. And so, drip by drip, the US war machine squeezed out its uranium-235 and plutonium, while the problem of how to build an atomic bomb was tackled by the physicists, chemists, and engineers at the Los Alamos complex in New Mexico. 

But Fermi s reactor just demonstrated the principle. To produce the amount of plutonium needed for a bomb, the Hanford plant was built in the state of Washington. The scale and speed of the project were such that the contract was signed for Hanford before the Fermi reactor actually ran. For the Hanford plant Seaborg and coworkers had to devise separation schemes for kilogram quantities of plutonium... 

Rediske, J. H., Kline, J. F. and Selders, A. A. (1955). The Absorption of Fission Products by Plants, Report No. HW-36734 (Hanford Atomic Products Operations, Richland, Washington). 

AQUATIC PLANTS Algae, decomposing Hanford, Washington, 1973 plutonium processing pond 241 Am 9472 DW 15... 

Over 5001 of HLW have been vitrified in France and Germany. In the USA, the HLW at the Nuclear Fuel Services plant in West Valley Plant, New York, have been vitrified (300 two-ton canisters) and vitrification is ongoing at the Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at Savannah River, South Carolina 1600 canisters by February 2004). A vitrification plant is under construction at Hanford, Washington. Vitrification of all of the HLW in the USA will generate approximately 20 000 canisters, which are destined for disposal at the geological repository at Yucca Mountain. 

The other three major activities within the waste isolation program are specific to particular sites. We are currently evaluating the potential of deep basalt flows below the Hanford reservation in the State of Washington. This work is managed by the Richland Operations Office and is being conducted by the Rockwell Hanford Company. An evaluation of a potential site is underway in southeast New Mexico for the location of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) which is primarily a facility for the placement of transuranium contaminated wastes (TRU) from the defense program. 

The fission product and encapsulation plant (FPCE) to be built by Isochem, Inc.y in Washington state will produce fully encapsulated fission products for the commercial market. Among these, all of which are extractable from Hanford s plutonium process residues, is cesium-137, a 600-kv. gamma emitter of interest to the process irradiation industry. Isochem will offer cesium in large production quantities and low cost to irradiators of foods, woods, chemicals, etc. Its 30-year half-life promises economies in source array replenishment to compensate for decay. Cesium thus becomes an economic contender for current and planned irradiation applications. 

Tiffin, L. O. (1977). The form and distribution of metals in plants an overview. In Hanford Life Sciences Symposium. Proc., Symp. Ser., U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, DC, 315. 

Hanford, Washington. The key task of designing this one-of-a-kind plant fell to the Engineering Department.6... 

The first high-level waste tanks under construction in 1944 at the Manhattan Project s plutonium plant in Hanford, Washington. (Courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy, Hanford Declassified Document Retrieval System.)... 

Spray column contactors were used in the first large-scale solvent extraction plants at Hanford, Washington, for recovering plutonium from irradiated natural uranium and in the first chemical processing plant at Idaho for recovering enriched [L2]. 

As of 1980, the world s nuclear power reactors were producing more than 20,000 kg of plutonium per year (Weast ]980). In addition to these, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) has operated nuclear reactors to produce nuclear materials for the nation s defense program. These include plants at Savannah River, South Carolina, and the Hanford Works in Richland, Washington. 

In addition to accidental releases of radioactivity, some processing practices have resulted in chronic contamination of the environment. For example, the Hanford nuclear processing plant in Washington released from its operations prior to 1972, and elevated levels were still found in the air for several years following the plant closure. A processing plant in Karlsruhe, Germany, has also created elevated enviromnental levels of... 

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