A vacant tunnel leading to a 60-year-old plutonium uranium extraction plant (called PUREX) on southeastern Washington’s Hanford Site has collapsed, according to reports. Hanford issued a warning to employees and ordered those in the vicinity to shelter in place while crews investigated the 20×20-foot cave-in above the tunnel.
No one has been reported hurt or injured, and no radiological release has been reported. But by noon Pacific Time, several thousand workers had been asked to take cover.
The collapsed section of tunnel leads to PUREX, a facility that was built in the early 1950s to extract plutonium from irradiated fuel rods as part of the site’s nuclear weapons program. PUREX was in operation from 1956 to 1972 and from 1983 to 1988, according to Hanford’s website. The building has been vacant for two decades, and several rail cars that once transported fuel rods to the PUREX facility were buried in one of the tunnels near the facility due to contamination.
Per a video update from a Hanford spokesperson, a depression in the soil was discovered by employees doing a routine inspection of the area around 8am PT this morning. A subsequent investigation showed that a portion of the roof of the tunnel below had fallen in. One of the tunnels is 360 feet long, and the other is 1,700 feet long, according to Hanford’s information page. The collapse happened at a junction of the two tunnels. The two tunnels had about eight feet of soil covering them.
Although Hanford has offered no official account of why the collapse happened, an unnamed source speaking to King 5 suggested that “crews doing road work nearby may have created enough vibration to cause the collapse.”
Many of the nations’ aging nuclear weapons and nuclear waste sites are awaiting more permanent destruction and disposal. According to Hanford’s website:
PUREX is slated to be decontaminated, demolished, and some of its debris removed. The rail cars buried next to the facility will also be decontaminated, removed, and permanently buried. Also, the option of grouting the rail cars in-place within the tunnel is being evaluated since removal of the cars would entail extreme worker safety hazards and would be more costly than grouting in-place.
The Department of Energy has worked for years to move transuranic waste from nuclear weapons programs at sites like Hanford to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, or WIPP, in Carlsbad, New Mexico. In 2014, an accident in one of WIPP’s tunnels put disposal activities on hold. Limited disposal only just resumed this year. But according to the Tri-City Herald, no shipments are planned from Hanford to New Mexico in the near future.
A federal spending bill passed last week will restore $114 million to the Department of Energy’s Hanford cleanup operations, after a 2016 budget recommended that $191 million be cut. Currently, the program is funded at $840 million. That money is expected to be used to clean up contaminated groundwater and spill sites near the Columbia River.
Listing image by Jeff T. Green/Getty Images