Crews at the U.S. Energy Dept.’s Hanford nuclear-waste site in Washington state have placed the first of six massive, 50-ton shield doors at the site’s high-level waste treatment facility with a fit no wider than a human hair, say officials of San Francisco-based Bechtel National Inc., design-contractor for the $12.2-billion project on the 560-sq-mile site.
The shield door is in a key area of the 65-acre plant complex, which, when completed, will vitrify high-level nuclear waste now stored at the Hanford site in 144 aging and deteriorating underground storage tanks. More than 53 million gal of waste is left from the production of plutonium dates to the development and manufacture of the first atomic weapons at the complex during World War II.