Vit Plant Project Boosts Population

Retail and Housing Booming

Hanford is the biggest employer in the Tri-Cities and a mainstay of the economy, but the vitrification plant is bringing a whole new meaning to population growth.

The world's largest environmental cleanup project is under way in the Tri-Cities.

The goal: disposing of 53 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste being stored on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a few miles west of the Columbia River. At least 67 of the 177 underground tanks holding waste have leaked, threatening the river and millions of residents.

The solution is for Bechtel National Inc., San Francisco, to build a waste treatment plant to vitrify Hanford's tank waste. Vitrification, or glassification, is a process of blending tank waste with molten glass that is placed in stainless-steel canisters.

The project, with an annual price tag of $690 million, has brought more than 1,800 and as many as 3,700 employees to the Tri-Cities (Kennewick, Richland and Pasco) since construction began in 2001. It's one of the main reasons that the three cities have experienced spikes in population and commercial development.

The most notable booms are in Richland, where Kadlec Medical Center is about to begin a $67 million expansion project, and in Pasco, where grocery stores, strip centers and restaurants are replacing open land and sagebrush.

Although the Tri-Cities is benefiting economically from the vitrification project, federal funding to keep it moving hasn't been consistent. Bechtel asked for $690 million every year, but the Department of Energy designated $626 million for fiscal year 2006. The federal government cut another $100 million from the project to help fund Hurricane Katrina relief efforts, said Carrie Meyer, senior communication specialist for Bechtel National in Richland.

Bechtel has had to change the makeup of its labor force because of those shortages. An estimated 1,887 jobs will have been eliminated by March.

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Work for this year will focus on revisiting work that had already been done, particularly rechecking seismic standards. Engineers will be increasing seismic values to make sure the containers holding waste would be safe from the possibility of a "megaquake."

Researchers found evidence that the 680-mi.-long Cascadia fault could cause the largest earthquake ever recorded if energy stored up was released. Bechtel was informed last year that the seismic values used in thousands of engineering calculations for the project needed to be increased to protect the containers.

The project employs three steps: pretreatment, low-activity waste vitrification and high-level vitrification. In the pretreatment phase, waste is pumped from the underground storage tanks through a buried pipeline to the pretreatment facility. This is where low-activity radioactive waste and high-level activity radioactive waste are separated.

Waste identified as low-activity radioactive waste goes into a melter preparation vessel where silica and other glass-forming materials are added and the mixture is fed into a melter.

The mixture is heated to 2,100 degrees and is poured into stainless steel containers. High-level vitrified waste is treated similarly, but is poured into stainless steel containers that are 14 ft. tall, 2 ft. in diameter and weigh more than four tons. Eventually, these containers will be shipped to Yucca Mountain in Nevada for permanent disposal underground.

There will be minimal work on pretreating waste until fiscal year 2007 begins, Meyer said.

Finding qualified people for the vitrification project has been the biggest issue next to funding, Meyer said. Employees, including mechanical, structural and civil engineers have been recruited from around the world.

"Our biggest challenge was to find engineers with nuclear design experience," Meyer said, adding that this level of work has never been done.

Kadlec Medical Center's largest roadblock for its expansion project also involved the Department of Energy and Hanford workers trained in working with radioactive material.

The hospital paid $1.4 million to demolish a former DOE decontamination facility because it was where the footprint of the building had to go, Wortman said. It's a process that started in 2001 and wasn't finished until nine months ago because of its private-public partnership for demolition. As a result of the demolition, Kadlec had to put a decontamination suite in its emergency room.

The expansion project will add an estimated 155,000-sq.-ft. to the 250,000-sq.- ft. hospital. When the project is completed in spring 2008, Kadlec will have new operating rooms, recovery rooms, private patient rooms, mechanical space and an area where people who aren't ill enough to be admitted can be observed by staff. Boughten Construction of Spokane will lead the project.

The expansion project reflects the Mid-Columbia's general population growth as well as the area's increasing importance as a medical community. Kadlec now offers open-heart surgery, specialized imaging services and is the only neonatal intensive care unit in the region.

"Kadlec is growing and becoming more of a regional medical center," and patients are now coming from outside the Mid-Columbia for Kadlec services, Wortman said.

Pasco planner Dave McDonald said the commercial development in the Interstate 182 corridor is low on the list of communities seeing population spikes because of the vitrification project. But Pasco has seen spikes in apartment and housing developments in the past few years, leading to a rash of retail shops popping up along the corridor.

A 203,000-sq.-ft. Wal-Mart is one of the big-box businesses opening in the area.

Wal-Mart, built by Vandervert Construction of Spokane, had to abandon its traditional grey and black façade and chain fencing for a more uniform design standard being enforced in the corridor. The city of Pasco requires all developments along Road 68 to have stucco, brick, block or glass or any combination of these materials.

The Wal-Mart store, which opened in January, features three arches, block and stucco walls, columns, pillars and false windows.

McDonald doesn't expect commercial development to slow down as long as more homes and apartments continue to be built in the corridor. A movie theater, Walgreens and Lowe's are all anticipated projects, McDonald said.