After almost two years of quiet at the largest building at Hanford's vitrification plant, workers began putting up steel beams this week.

"It was a ghost town," said Larry Simmons, project manager for Bechtel National. "It's all coming back to life."

Major construction has resumed on both of the plant's structures where work stopped until the Department of Energy was sure their designs were adequate to withstand a severe earthquake.

Construction on the High Level Waste Facility resumed in September and work on the Pretreatment Facility resumed this week. Both will handle high-level radioactive waste as it is turned into a stable glass form for disposal.

Most of the construction at the Pretreatment Facility for the next 18 months will be structural work, which includes erecting steel and placing concrete, Simmons said.

The gray concrete walls of the building now stand about 56 feet high, topped with a fringe of rebar where the walls will continue to climb to about 12 stories high. Ribbons of orange safety fencing on the building are used to keep tools from falling on workers below. A plastic owl is perched on top to scare pigeons away.

Workers now are putting up a skeleton of steel along one length of the building that will be an operating corridor, one of the areas that workers can continue to enter once waste is piped into the building to be separated into high-level and low-activity radioactive waste streams.

"It's gone just exceedingly well," said Bob Johnson, Pretreatment Facility area superintendent, pointing out the newly constructed area.

The first pour of concrete in the building is planned for January. The Pretreatment Facility will require 113,500 cubic yards of concrete, both in slab floors eight feet thick and also walls up to 66 inches thick. The footprint of the building will be the width and length of two football fields.

Pallets around the building are stacked with lights, conduits for electrical wire and other equipment and supplies needed for the restart of construction.

Before construction resumed, many weeks were spent in preparation. That included making sure work was planned, people were trained and all the equipment and supplies needed were staged at the building.

Then the preparations underwent a formal review that Bechtel corporate officials participated in to make sure nothing had been overlooked. A DOE team came in as well.

"I'm very anxious to return to full construction, but we are being very careful and deliberate," said John Eschenberg, DOE project manager. "We are just starting to restore confidence and credibility within Congress and the community. We can't afford any mistakes."

Funding of $684 million for construction this year approved by Congress - with the support of Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash. - is an indication that the project may have earned back some credibility, Eschenberg said.

Congress had withheld some money earlier as the cost of the plant increased to $12.2 billion and the start to operations was delayed eight years, in part because of concerns about earthquake design standards and other technical issues.

Workers will need until at least October 2015 to finish construction on the Pretreatment Facility.

"We're looking for the building skeleton to be erected so the craftsmen can come in and hang their commodities" such as piping and ductwork, Simmons said. The building will include 891 tons of ductwork, about 100 miles of piping and about 270 miles of electrical cable.

"The piping is where it is going to get difficult," Eschenberg said. "It was hard for the guys to design it. It will be hard for the guys to build it."

Total staffing at the vitrification plant project now stands at about 3,100, with 180 Bechtel National openings posted for nonconstruction workers. The total includes about 650 manual workers at the construction site and about 50 at the construction yard.

Work for manual, or construction workers, is expected to peak at about 1,500 in 2014. Positions for nonmanual workers, such as engineers, during construction is expected to peak in 2009 with about 2,600 employees, including a few engineers based in California and Maryland offices.

Overall employment on the project is expected to peak in 2009 or 2010 at 3,500 to 3,700 employees. In addition, the mix of skills needed on the project will continue to shift. That includes changing from positions for engineers designing the plant to jobs for workers preparing for the commissioning and startup of the plant.

w On the Net: www.waste2glass.com; www.bechtel.com/careers