CH2M Hill Plateau Remediation Company recently awarded a $11.3 million subcontract to Kennewick’s Apollo Mechanical Contractors Inc. to prepare Hanford’s 324 Building for installation of remote-operated equipment to clean up highly radioactive soil under the building.

The building is about a mile north of Richland and about 300 yards west of the Columbia River. The soil under one of the contaminated rooms, called hot cells, was so contaminated by operations in the former chemical laboratory that conventional excavation methods can’t be used, and remote-operated equipment must be used to excavate through the floor of the hot cell to reach the underlying soil, according to a news release from CH2M Hill.

The contract with Apollo includes removing old equipment and wiring from the walls of the hot cells and drilling holes in the walls for later installation of remote-operated cleanup equipment.

Apollo is also preparing the hot cells to be filled with grout after contaminated soil is removed, by covering and sealing holes in the walls, called penetrations, where wires and piping passed through, to keep grout from oozing out of the hot cells when filled.

The contract also includes designing, building and demonstrating a remote-operated tool for cutting piping in the hot cells, as well as modifying the building’s foundation to ensure stability during soil removal.

“This is an exciting time for our project and the team of dedicated people who brought us to this point,” said Mike Douglas, acting vice president for CH2M’s 324 Building disposition project, in a statement. “We’ve advanced the project to the point we’re actually about to begin making the necessary modifications to the building to allow us to install equipment that will be used to remove the radioactive soil under the building.”

Apollo will begin making modifications to the 324 Building hot cells in the coming weeks and will work through most of 2018.

Removal of the contaminated soil is expected to begin in 2019.

In the meantime, CH2M employees are removing radioactive debris from the building’s airlock to enable easier access to the building’s highly contaminated hot cells. They are also finishing modifications to a mock-up structure that will be used to demonstrate remote-operated equipment and train operators in a clean environment before the retrieval equipment is installed in the 324 Building’s hot cells.

The 324 Building is one of the last remaining in Hanford’s 300 Area, where research was conducted and fuel rods were fabricated to support the Hanford Site’s plutonium production process.

CH2M Hill is a U.S. Department of Energy contractor.