August 22, 2022 – The largest – and often deemed the hottest – nuclear building at the West Valley Demonstration Project will start to come down next month.
With concrete walls one to five feet thick, it will be a laborious process to dismantle the building safely to contain the remaining radiation. The engineered demolition is expected to take 32 months.
“It’s not like taking a demolition ball and knocking it down,” said Joseph Pillittere, spokesman for the contractor, CH2M HILL BWXT West Valley. “We want to take it down piece by piece to maintain the stability of the structure. This is all preplanned.”
It is a major step in the more than half century of history at the former reprocessing plant 35 miles south of Buffalo, where 640 metric tons of irradiated nuclear fuel was processed to recover reusable plutonium and uranium from spent nuclear reactor fuel. Link to article
