Hanford landfill keeps growing

Annette Cary;Herald staff writer ary Annette11 February 2010Tri-City HeraldTRIC(c) 2010 The Tri-City Herald. All Rights Reserved.

Hanford’s super-sized landfill is getting two new “super cells.”
An excavator started digging up large shovelfuls of dirt Wednesday for the latest expansion of the Hanford landfill for low-level radioactive waste.
With the infusion of nearly $2 billion in economic stimulus money to speed up environmental cleanup at the Hanford nuclear reservation, the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility is being filled faster than ever. The contents of about 400 containers holding an average of 20 tons of waste apiece are added to the site each day.
“ARRA (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act) funds are actually doing real work at Hanford,” said Dave Einan, an engineer for the Environmental Protection Agency, a Hanford regulator. “We are going to need the capacity.”

TradeWind Services, a Richland company founded in 2005, was awarded a subcontract worth up to $30 million for the latest expansion. It will increase landfill capacity by 50 percent to 16.4 million tons.

The contract includes excavating and lining super cell 10, on which digging began Wednesday, and finishing super cell 9, which already has been excavated. They’re called super cells because each is twice the size of the first eight disposal areas.

Each super cell will be 70 feet deep and measure 1,000-feet-by-500-feet, making the bulldozers and excavators working there look like inches-long Matchbox toys.

Washington Closure Hanford, which operates the landfill, expects to receive about $100 million in federal economic stimulus money for expansion of the landfill and other improvements so it can accept and handle increased daily volumes of waste.

Work began to excavate super cell 9 in the fall when DelHur Industries of Hermiston was given a Washington Closure subcontract to start digging without a bidding process. The goal then was to quickly put stimulus money to work and DelHur already had built all cells to date except cells 5 and 6.

TradeWind Services also has hired DelHur as its subcontractor for the earthwork on super cell 10 and as one of several subcontractors that will work on portions of the liner for super cells 9 and 10.

Washington Closure is required by DOE to mentor at least two small businesses, and named TradeWind as one of its mentor-proteges last December.

TradeWind already had built a business supplying staff to Hanford, but wanted to branch out into the construction and environmental remediation business, said Washington Closure spokesman Todd Nelson.

The company qualifies as a small business owned by a disabled military veteran, Jeffrey Hertzel, who had worked at Hanford since 1983 before starting his company.
The company has grown to employ about 30 people with 50 to 60 more under contracts, said Hertzel, president of the company. It’s doing work on multiple Hanford projects, for Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and at the Nevada Test Site.money with small businesses owned by disabled veterans.
As a mentor-protege company of Washington Closure, TradeWind may receive significant guidance in business development, safety, quality and operations from Washington Closure.
TradeWind should have super cell 9 finished in early 2011. Although it’s been excavated, the cell’s liner still must be built.
The liner system will be 7 feet deep with a layer of a clay and soil mix at its base, three layers of heavy duty plastic, a foot of rock and 3 feet of clean soil to protect the lining system. It also includes a moisture collection system to prevent water from seeping through the landfill and spreading contamination.
Super cell 10 should be finished by fall 2011.the Department of Energy started to also route waste to cells 7 and 8.
The first eight cells cover the same area as 35 football fields and so far hold 9 million tons of waste material.