By RICK MILLER
Olean Star
OLEAN — Earlier this year, after three years of painstaking demolition, the five story Main Plant Process Building at the West Valley Demonstration Project was brought down to ground level.
Jason Casper, president and program manager of the West Valley Cleanup Alliance, the contractor overseeing the next phase of the cleanup spoke to the Cattaraugus County Board of Health Wednesday.
Casper said the below ground demolition of components of the Main Process Plant Building include about 25% more concrete and steel than the above ground portion of the building. The footprint of the building has been covered in a rubber membrane to keep water out.
With the demolition to ground level of the Main Plant Process Building, the cleanup will progress to other areas while engineering to remove the foundation and the removal of about 12 million cubic feet of earth surrounding the site.
Also being engineered, Casper said, is a 3-foot thick wall that will surround the building and earth removal area designed to run between 30 and 70 feet below grade. He said the project is between two and three years from the start of excavation.
Casper pointed out a permeable treatment wall at the site intercepts a strontium 90 plume that originated with a spill during the plant’s days as the nation’s first commercial nuclear reprocessing plant. The plant took spent nuclear rods from power plants, removing plutonium. It’s not clear how much strontium leached into area waterways over the years it went undetected, but Casper said little more than background radiation makes its way through the permeable wall.
The plant, operated by Nuclear Fuel Services Inc., closed in 1972 and did not reopen. New York State and the federal government were assigned to the cleanup of the site under the West Valley Demonstration Project Act of 1980.
Casper said much of the nuclear waste at the site is packaged awaiting a site to ship it for permanent storage like the radioactive glass logs in casks stored in large concrete containers at the site.
Shipping and disposal “costs as much if not more” than the cleanup,” Casper said.
The Department of Energy, which oversees the site, plans to spend $3 billion for Phase 1B. More than $2 billion has been spent on Phase 1 at the site since the federal government took over in 1980.
The most challenging aspects of the work was the solidification of radioactive liquid waste stored in large underground tanks from when the plant operated, and the removal of the solidified radioactive waste from the Main Plant Process Building.
No determination has been made on whether to cut up and remove the underground tanks which held the liquid wastes, including one which still contains sludge. The two tanks have a steel infrastructure which contains a radioactive residue. The site is located on a plateau which drains into Cattaraugus Creek and empties into Lake Erie
Other upcoming Phase 1B work includes:
- Waste management and legacy waste disposition.
- Tank farm sludge removal.
- Safeguards and security.
- Environmental monitoring.
- Program support activities.
Casper said up to 35% of the work would be subcontracted to existing and new small businesses
Some of the 2025 goals are safety, phase one of radiological soil sampling, complete a plan to demolish the fuel receiving and storage facility, begin onsite rail reconfiguration, complete 60% of the design for waste management area 1 remediation, modernize WVDP policies and programs.
