Plateau Remediation Project

Comprehensive nuclear waste and services

A pre-selected teaming subcontractor to perform waste management and facility operations at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Hanford Site.

Project Details

The Hanford Plateau Remediation Contract (PRC) advanced the cleanup of the central portion of the Hanford Site, known as the 200 Area or the Central Plateau, which once housed five chemical separations buildings and other facilities that separated and recovered plutonium and other materials for use in nuclear weapons.

To address the challenges associated with the Plateau cleanup activities, Our wholly-owned subsidiary East Tennessee Materials & Energy Corporation (M&EC) joined with CH2M Hill as a pre-selected teaming subcontractor to perform waste management and facility operations at the DOE Hanford Site. CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company (CHPRC) took control as the prime contractor to manage the cleanup of the Hanford Plateau. CHPRC was awarded a cost plus incentive fee contract valued at approximately $4.5 billion over 10 years.

The scope of the CHPRC contract included completion of the Plutonium Finishing Plant project; characterization of facilities and waste sites; disposal activities related to non-tank farm waste; environmental surveillance and maintenance (O&M); groundwater monitoring and remediation; environmental remediation; and development of documents for regulatory and other decisions covering groundwater, soil, and facilities.

Our scope included personnel transition, operation and maintenance of central plateau processing and treatment, repackaging, storage, and disposal facilities and the Engineering Procurement and Construction Project. We oversaw the O&M of over 30 facilities and disposal areas making up the Solid Waste Operations Complex (SWOC), which included 16 Central Waste Complex (CWC) facilities, T Plant (HazCat 2), Low Level Burial Grounds (LLBG) (HazCat 2), and the maintenance of the Integrated Disposal Facility (IDF) (HazCat 3).

We managed the projects LLW, MLLW, TRU, and TRU MLLW generated from clean-up and retrieval operations and were responsible for TRU waste size reduction and repackaging operations within T-Plant; packaging, profiling, storage and inventory control of approximately 150,000 cubic feet of TRU, LLW, and MLLW wastes annually within the CWC; O&M of disposal facilities (LLBGs) for LLW and MLLW; processing recovered legacy waste containers by venting, headspace gas sampling (HSGS), packaging/repackaging, and over-packing of retrieved wastes; and development and management of a centralized project support team responsible for coordinating all waste movements on-site with Hanford generators.