The US's historic Hanford site, and accelerated decommissioning

Well, that fits in well with some of the things we're gonna come on to discuss with future uses of sites.

Uh, but you mentioned the Hanford site has got quite some history to it, to put it mildly.

For those who aren't familiar, can you give a brief outline in how that has led to the huge job of work being done at the moment?

Yeah, absolutely.

So the Hanford site, uh, and I use this as an analogy, it is a matter of scale.

So the Hanford site itself is 586 square miles.

That is about the size of London, and so it's an enormous operation.

Originally, over 40 years, the Hanford site was involved in the production of nuclear materials for weapons production, uh, including plutonium, so an amazing bit of work at Hanford that was supporting the defense industry for decades and decades through nine reactors, multiple separations facilities, storage facilities.

And so out of that came a, a large amount of chemical and radioactive waste.

There are 177 tanks that contain about on the order of 56 million gallons of waste chemical and radioactive waste.

And so the largest tank waste cleanup mission is ongoing at Hanford, an, an enormous amount of success building and operating now a vitrification plant for low-level waste, success in getting to a position in which we can take waste into a grouted waste form in west area, as they call it at Hanford.

And then now we're moving into cleanup not only for the tank waste, but of all the subsurface cleanup that needs to be done as part of also another Amentum industry for the Central Plateau Cleanup Company.

So Hanford has got, uh, started in 19- the early 1940s, and so you're looking at, uh, 80 years of work and then probably another 30 or 30 to 50 years of cleanup going on at the Hanford site.

It's, from the defense mission standpoint, it's really a testament to the workforce that was able to support all of that work to support the defense, and now that same support and that local community is really supporting the cleanup mission, and we get a lot of advocacy for that.

Now, moving forward, as part of that cleanup mission, the Department of Energy and the US government really has exercised some great creativity in how do you access this 586 square miles once cleanup is done to regenerate, to re-industrialize, to revitalize that in new arenas.

And so I'd say really the, the threefold is an enormous amount of work in the early '40s all the way through the '80s in defense production, now success in cleanup and moving into the cleanup mission.

That will take some time.

And then in the meantime, an incremental approach to accessing parts of that site, whether it be land or it be the, the technical resources that support this in a nuclear industry and a chemical and a high-hazard industry.

So it is really transforming now, and with the leadership of the Department of Energy and, uh, the contractors on site, large enterprise to come in the future.

future.So dating back to the 1940s, this must be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, nuclear site in the world.

It is, uh, so part of the original Manhattan Project, so really a great bit of history there.

The B reactor was the first reactor to go critical.

It is now a National Park Service landmark, national historical site.

So if you get out to Hanford, it's very interesting.

You know, we have Leslie Groves Park.