Hanford's Plutonium Finishing Plant is expected to begin converting scrap plutonium into safer forms in January after a two-year delay.

Earlier this month, the PFP's staff earned good grades on a 10-day Department of Energy review - jumping the last major hurdle to sending plutonium through small furnaces to bake it into a safer, ceramiclike powder.

The inspections and testing that began Dec. 1 produced a list of 15 minor to moderate corrective actions Hanford officials believe will be fixed soon.

As a result, the "stabilization" process is expected to begin in early to mid-January, said Larry Olguin, Fluor Daniel Hanford's project director for facilities transition.

Olguin and Pete Knollmeyer, DOE's assistant manager for facilities transition, praised the plant's staff for turning the previously troubled operation into one that impressed an outside DOE inspection team.

"We're finally seeing an improvement in morale and performance. We're over the top," Knollmeyer said.

Olguin added the PFP staff "worked diligently, long and hard." The outside inspectors looked at five key areas - criticality safety, emergency preparedness, quality assurance, maintenance and radiological controls.

Two years ago, the PFP was floundering in the radiological controls and emergency preparedness - which even looked worse after a botched response to a May 1997 chemical tank explosion.

Olguin and Knollmeyer noted those two problem areas got extremely good grades in the recent review by the inspectors.

And Olguin noted one inspector gave the PFP criticality safety program the best marks he had ever given any plant.

All this signals the impending end of a two-year moratorium on stabilizing plutonium, which began January 1997.

The PFP holds 4.4 tons of scrap plutonium in many forms.

In late 1996, B&W Hanford Co. - a subcontractor of Fluor - took over the plant from Westinghouse Hanford Co.

A series of plutonium handling mistakes in late 1996 and early 1997 led to the increased chances of a criticality incident occurring in which a potentially fatal burst of radiation could have been released.

That led B&W Hanford to halt the moving and conversion work to overhaul the procedures and training.

Meanwhile, those mistakes led DOE to fine Fluor and B&W Hanford $112,500.

The complexity of the overhaul, budget crunches and delays from an unrelated chemical explosion stretched the moratorium to two years.

And it bumped the predicted completion date for stabilization from 2002 to 2005. However, Fluor and B&W Hanford are working on ways to recover some of that lost time.

Fluor and B&W Hanford tackled the restart in two phases. Last spring, they completed enough of the overhaul to be able to move plutonium around but stopping short of putting the material through the furnaces.

Roughly three-quarters of the plutonium will be converted into a safer form by sending it through oven-like "muffle furnaces" - the step that is expected to begin in January.

The stabilization of plutonium-laced liquids is expected to phase in from mid- to late 1999.

Hanford officials hope to begin converting the remaining types of scrap plutonium in fiscal 2000.