HANFORD -- The first contaminated glove boxes have been removed from Hanford's 300 Area just north of Richland as cleanup progresses there to more hazardous buildings.

"We start with lower risk and move to higher risk," said Bob Smith, Washington Closure Hanford director of decontamination and demolition.

Hanford workers so far have brought down 79 of 210 buildings in the area just north of Richland, according to the Department of Energy. They were used during World War II and the Cold War for research and manufacturing fuel to be irradiated to produce plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons program.

Now contractor Washington Closure Hanford is working to meet legal cleanup deadlines on four buildings that have higher levels of contamination.

That includes the 308 Building, originally called the Plutonium Fabrication Pilot Plant and later the Fuels Development Laboratory.

Washington Closure faces the challenge there of disposing of 53 glove boxes where workers would look through windows and reach into ports with attached gloves to do work with radioactive materials. Most are 8 to 12 feet long and weigh about 1,200 pounds.

The building was used starting in 1960 for the development of reactor fuel, including the testing of fuel irradiated to produce plutonium. Later it was used to prepare and test fuel for Hanford's Fast Flux Test Facility.

The work left the inside of many of the glove boxes contaminated with plutonium.

Rather than cutting up the glove boxes inside the building, Washington Closure has chosen to pull them out intact and then send them to Perma-Fix in Richland to be cut into smaller pieces and packaged in containers.

Perma-Fix will send debris from most of the glove boxes to the nation's repository in New Mexico for transuranic waste, including Hanford waste contaminated with plutonium. However, 17 of the glove boxes qualify as low-level radioactive waste and their debris can be sent to the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility in central Hanford.

To prepare the glove boxes for removal, workers apply fixative outside and inside the boxes as needed. In some cases external equipment also is removed. Then any power and piping are disconnected and the glove boxes are wrapped and taken from the building.

Workers are dressed in protective clothing and use supplied air respirators to do the work. But that did not prevent three workers from inhaling small amounts of radioactive contaminants in an incident in October.

As they were removing a pipe, it hit a nearby small glass globe on the outside of a glove box and broke it, allowing contamination to become airborne in the room.

"They had all the right equipment on," Smith said. "They responded correctly and left immediately."

Tests showed two of the workers received a whole body dose from plutonium 239 of less than 10 millirems. The third worker received a dose of 15 to 20 millirems of plutonium 238 and 239 and americium 241.

The allowable exposure at Hanford is 500 millirems per year, which the exposures were well within.

Since then all the glove boxes have been checked for similar glass pieces and the few that have them have been wrapped to prevent another accident.

The Environmental Protection Agency continues to believe the best plan is being followed to remove the glove boxes.

"I think we all feel it can be done safely," said Alicia Boyd, EPA environmental engineer. "It's a tough job."

Removing the glove boxes intact and cutting them up in the appropriate facilities elsewhere is a better plan than the alternative of cutting them up in the building, she said.

Work has been under way for several months at the 308 Building, but shipments of glove boxes are just beginning, with shipments of one or two glove boxes planned each week.

Work is in earlier stages on the next three higher hazard buildings.

DOE must have the 308 and 309 buildings down by fall 2011 to meet a legally binding Tri-Party Agreement deadline.

The 309 Building includes the Plutonium Recycle Test Reactor, a Hanford landmark since 1960 because of its distinctive dome rising above the surrounding buildings just north of Richland. It was an operating test reactor.

The 308 Building also has a test reactor, the Training Research Isotopes General Atomic reactor, in an adjacent annex that was used to perform neutron radiography quality testing of fuel elements and fuel jackets.

Work on the 309 Building so far has included characterization and deactivation work.

The other two buildings, 324 and 327, have Tri-Party Agreement deadlines for demolition of Sept. 30, 2010, but Washington Closure has started with 308 and 309 to gain experience before tackling them.

The hot cells in the 324 Building are large, some with two or three levels and with four- to six-foot-thick concrete walls, Smith said. Called the Waste Technology Engineering Laboratory, it was used for chemical reprocessing and metallurgical examination of fuel elements from the 309 test reactor. Its cleanup is in the planning stage.

The 327 Building, also called the Radiometallurgy Building, was used to examine and test irradiated materials, in part to determine the effects of higher power levels of irradiation on different structural materials.

It contains about a dozen hot cells smaller than those in the 327 Building. Washington Closure plans to saw the hot cells off the floor and move them out this spring, Smith said.