Lectures at the Library: Cleaning up Hanford

DAYTON- The Dayton Memorial Library hosted speakers from the Washington Department of Ecology's Nuclear Waste Program on November 7 and 15. Community Outreach and Environmental Education Specialist Sarah Williams, and Communication Manager Ryan Miller presented the department's progress on clean-up efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.

From 1945 to 1988, plutonium production at Hanford resulted in more than 400 billion gallons of contaminated liquid waste. That waste was stored in underground tanks, many of which have leaked, or injected into underground wells, resulting in 85 square miles of contaminated groundwater and endangering the Columbia River.

Williams said good progress has been made on cleanup since a Tri-Party Agreement for cleanup was signed in 1989 by the Department of Energy, which owns the site, and the Departments of Ecology and Environmental Protection, which are regulatory agencies.

"This is a living document," said Williams. "There are 2,000 milestones and we have completed about 1800 of those."

Seven of the nine reactors have been decommissioned, or "mothballed". The "B" reactor is now a national monument, usually open to the public for tours. Energy Northwest operates the remaining reactor.

Eighty percent of the waste sites and two thousand support facilities have been remediated. Thirty-six billion gallons of contaminated groundwater have been cleaned.

"More excitedly in 2025, or more specifically in October, we achieved 'hot commissioning' at our waste treatment plant," Williams said about the new glass vitrification plant.

Miller said that hot commissioning takes low-level waste through a pretreatment process, removing more highly radioactive waste, such as cesium, and converting the low-level waste into a stable form of glass, which will then be permanently stored at the nearby Integrated Disposal Facility. Twenty-one metric tons of waste will be processed daily when the plant reaches full capacity. A portion of the low-level waste will be encapsulated in grout form for off-site disposal.

"This is a lot less radioactive with just more chemicals and more hazardous waste," Miller said.

All the waste is high-level waste, Miller emphasized. Plans are for high-level waste to be treated starting in 2033 and stored at a licensed deep geologic repository.