State and federal officials have officially signed off on an agreement changing the legal cleanup schedule at the Hanford nuclear reservation, which houses the most radioactively contaminated waste in the Western Hemisphere.
Officials say the agreement, signed last week, will accelerate the cleanup of the site’s nuclear waste while maintaining safety. The project has busted budgets and deadlines in recent decades.
Last April, after four years of negotiations, the feds and state came to a tentative agreement to a 35-year legal contract governing Hanford’s cleanup, which includes how to deal with 56 million gallons of radioactive fluids and sludges in 177 leak-prone underground tanks roughly seven miles from the Columbia River.
The U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington Department of Ecology have spent the past eight months seeking public input and tweaking the tentative agreement.
In the early 1990s, state and federal officials decided Hanford tank waste should be mixed with glass flakes and melted together so the radioactive substances cannot escape for 10,000 years, a process called glassification. The original $4 billion glassification plant was supposed to be ready by 2009 and the work completed by 2019. The budget for glassification now is $17 billion and is expected to reach possibly $30 billion, according to various reports.
Currently, Hanford’s legal target calls for glassifying all wastes by 2052. DOE has internally moved those targets back to 2069, according to a 2021 report by the Government Accountability Office. That date was not reflected in the changed legal agreement, but those deadlines could be changed in the future.
The new agreement keeps the previous timeline of starting to glassify less-radioactive tank wastes this year. Work on processing the 5 million to 6 million gallons of high-level wastes, which hold most of the radioactivity, is scheduled to start in 2033. However, the low-level waste glassification plant set to start operating this year can handle only roughly half of the wastes, which means a second plant will have to be built.
The finalized agreement also allows Hanford to use a new technology called grouting — mixing low-level wastes from 22 tanks within a type of cement. This technology has not yet been perfected with chemically complicated Hanford tank wastes. Other technologies and auxiliary plants are also covered in the new agreement.
“More tank waste will get retrieved, treated, and disposed through 2040 and beyond. This is the best way to ensure surrounding communities and the Columbia River are protected,” said state ecology director Laura Watson in a press release.
“This historic agreement … establishes an achievable plan for our Hanford tank waste mission for the next 15 years,” said DOE’s Hanford manager Brian Vance in the same news release.
