News Releases | ARRA

Local business receives $3.8 million ARRA cleanup subcontract

06.24.2010

RICHLAND, Wash.—Washington Closure Hanford has awarded a subcontract worth $3.8 million to Ojeda Business Ventures of Richland.

The subcontract is to cleanup 13 waste sites, with an option for cleanup of additional waste sites as needed, in Hanford’s F Area. Funding for the work comes from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

The sites being cleaned up include a coal pit, underground piping and sewers, as well as sites for a former maintenance garage and electrical substation. The sites are contaminated with radioactive materials and hazardous materials, such as mercury, PCBs, asbestos, hexavalent chromium, pesticides and volatile organic compounds.

Ojeda is scheduled to begin cleanup work in August and expects to complete the job by April 2011.

Hanford’s F Area was home to one of the original three plutonium production reactors built as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. The mission was to produce plutonium for use in atomic weapons. The reactor operated from February 1945 to June 1965.

During the early days of the nuclear age, little was known about the effects of radiation. To learn more, the U.S. government established a life sciences research laboratory at F Area where the effects of radiation on plants and animals could be studied.

“The radioactive remnants of some of those research activities will be cleaned up during this campaign,” said Jon Fancher, project manager for the work. “Aside from some miscellaneous surface debris, such as telephone poles and rail road tracks, we will be done with cleanup in the F Area once Ojeda finishes its work.”

Mark French, U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Richland Operations Office, said, “Cleaning up the remaining contaminated wastes near the F Reactor supports the Department of Energy’s 2015 Vision for completing cleanup of the River Corridor. Thanks to funding from the Recovery Act, we can finish all of the remaining F Area work.” French is DOE’s Federal Project Director for the River Corridor Closure Project.

Washington Closure Hanford is a limited liability company managed by URS, Bechtel and CH2M Hill. It manages the $2.4 billion River Corridor Closure Project for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Richland Operations Office.

The company is responsible for demolishing 486 buildings, cleaning up 370 contaminated waste sites, placing two plutonium production reactors and one nuclear facility in interim safe storage, and managing the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility – an onsite, engineered landfill for radioactive and mixed wastes generated during Hanford cleanup.

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