HANFORD -- Hanford workers are demolishing cold war era storage buildings.

The last of three buildings that stored spent nuclear fuel are being demolished.

It's a 12 point 5 million dollar project using federal stimulus money.

Project director Robert Wilkinson says without the federal aid, the demolition wouldn't have happened for several more years.

"It allows the Department of Energy to help attain one of their goals to shrink the footprint down of the Hanford site to a 10 square mile radius that otherwise wouldn't be able to accomplish in a timely matter"

Wilkinson says the building has low-level contamination, which isn't much or a threat, but taking care of it now will prevent any possible spread.

The recovery act funding was provided by the DOE in April.

40 new workers were hired and trained to help existing staff work on the project.

"On this project, everything has gone extremely well, we're making good progress that the new folks we brought out here have melded well in, we've got them trained up and the their actually starting to gain efficiencies"

About 30 workers are at the site at any given time, working between monitoring, demolishing, or supervising.

For some workers, cleaning up the Hanford Site means something personal.

"I am a big fisherman and I spend a lot of time salmon steelhead fishing in the columbia river so it is very important for me to get that cleaned up before it does start contaminating that river" said Marty Howser.

The project also includes remediating waste sites near the buildings and disposing of 15 contaminated rail cars that once transported reactor fuel rods.