The Long History of the Hanford Site
For almost three months when I was in college, I covered the environmental cleanup beat for Platts Inside Energy. It was here that I first heard about the Hanford Site in Washington. At the time, it was bogged down in lawsuits, delays, and a gubernatorial election.
Since then, I have moved away from covering nuclear waste cleanup sites, but Hanford has always been in the back of my mind. Now that I’m writing about these topics again, I was curious to find out where Hanford stood and if any progress has been made in almost 20 years. A lot has happened but like with all things — the more they change, the more they stay the same.
Hanford — The Spot of Scientific Breakthroughs and its Aftermath
The Hanford Site began life as part of the Manhattan Project during World War II. Along the Columbia River, the U.S. Government built a nuclear production complex that included the B Reactor, the first full-scale production plutonium reactor in the world, along with eight additional nuclear reactors and five large plutonium processing complexes by the time the last reactor was decommissioned in 1987.
What was left behind is the country’s most contaminated nuclear site with 53 million gallons of high-level radioactive waste stored within 177 storage tanks, an additional 25 million cubic feet of solid radioactive waste, and three tank farms that is contaminated the groundwater.
In 1989, the U.S. Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington State Department of Ecology signed the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA), establishing 161 milestones for cleanup. The TPA is reviewed at 5-year intervals to evaluate each remedy’s implementation and performance to determine if the ongoing cleanup will protect human health and the environment.
In 2004, while I was covering the Hanford Site for Platts Inside Energy, the site was tangled in the debate over Yucca Mountain and mired in litigation over the cleanup. The state of Washington and the DOE were involved in two federal litigation cases involving shipments of radioactive waste to the Hanford Site as well as environmental conditions at Hanford. At the time, the state claimed that DOE had failed to adequately assess environmental damage to Hanford and surrounding areas from plutonium production.
Litigation was just one front of the battle for DOE over management of the Hanford Site. That summer the Government Accountability Office (GAO) also released a report stating that the DOE had significantly understated the potential costs of a federal court decision rejecting DOE’s plan to reclassify some of the high-level waste stored in tanks at the Hanford Site. To circumvent the U.S. District Court decision, DOE sought a legislative resolution that would specifically authorize the DOE to reclassify sludge that remained in tanks at Hanford, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
DOE’s management of the Hanford Site also came under fire from former senior administration officials within the government. In 2004, one former Clinton administration adviser urged Congress to authorize the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to take over regulation of the site’s vitrification plant. The official also called for additional steps to be taken to reduce the risks of Hanford’s high-level waste, including more restrictive limits on onsite disposal of tank wastes, DOE-built pilot plants to test pretreatment of wastes before they are sent to the vitrification plant, and strengthen DOE oversight of the project by establishing a full-time project management group reporting to the assistant secretary of environmental management.
Finally, the DOE also levied its largest fine, at the time, against its lead contractor Fluor Hanford Inc. for alleged design and management deficiencies for a project designed to remove sludge from basins containing spent nuclear fuel. DOE had cited numerous violations of nuclear safety requirements of the Sludge and Water System.
Since 2004, Progress Has Been Made at Hanford — But Not Enough
Almost 20 years later, there is more to be done at the Hanford Site. Today, about 60 square miles of groundwater remains contaminated above federal standards — and the level of contamination has been greatly reduced for significant portions of the area. But leaks are still being reported at the site. As recently as March 2021, DOE confirmed that one of its underground tanks was leaking waste into the ground, making it the second tank known to be currently leaking.
The DOE continues to work with its contractors to safely dispose of the waste that remains at Hanford. The Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant, known as the Hanford Vit Plant, is still under construction across 65 acres of the complex and the DOE currently estimates that it will cost over $16 billion to finish the plant. The Vit Plant will treat and “vitrify”, of glassify, the tank waste for safer disposal. Vitrification is a method used to immobilize radioactive waste by turning it into glass blocks and storing in steel containers and depositing into a dry and geologically stable underground vault. With the waste encased, the risk of harmful radionuclides leaching into rivers or underground tables is nullified.
This year, Bechtel began hiring and training laboratory and radiological technicians to prepare for the cold commissioning of the Vit Plant. They join chemists hired last year and will be responsible for analyzing approximately 3,000 samples of tank waste each year.
But progress has been made in other areas of the Hanford Site, including the removal of the last of the highly radioactive sludge that was being stored in underwater containers near the Columbia River in September 2019.
For low-activity waste, the DOE latest strategy calls for bypassing the pretreatment facility. To do this, they are proposing pumping the liquid waste into a smaller system, near the tanks where the waste is stored. This system will filter out large solids and remove radioactive cesium. The liquid will then flow to the low-activity waste vitrification plant to be glassified.
Once again, the DOE is trying to change the way it classifies “high-level radioactive waste” as they tried back in 2004. In June 2019, the DOE stated that it wants to categorize “high-level radioactive waste” based not on how it was produced but rather on its chemical composition. This new interpretation would allow certain waste to be turned into a groutlike form rather than go through the extensive pretreatment and vitrification process. But the state of Washington’s Department of Ecology and leaders of the Yakama Nation have express concern that this new interpretation would lead to more contamination and a lower the standards of clean-up that all parties have been trying to uphold with the TPA.
Where Do We Go From Here?
It’s been a long journey for the largest Superfund site in the U.S. that isn’t close to being over. Since the 1989 TPA, significant progress has been made, but completion of the project is still facing a flurry of red tape and lack of federal funding that jeopardizes the project’s ability to meet milestones.
Already this year, the Hanford Site deadlines have been pushed. As recently as last month, the DOE announced that full disposal of nuclear waste from Hanford to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant repository could be delayed by 20 years following an accidental radiological release that took place at the WIPP site in 2014.
In addition, the DOE suspended the May award of a 10-year, $13 billion contract to contractors to manage, clean up and close 177 contaminated underground waste storage tanks because the procurement process needs “corrective action”. The delay doesn’t look like it will postpone meeting cleanup milestones under the TPA, but the delay in awarding the contract is just another hiccup in a long series of them.
Finally, the Biden administration is proposing cutting funding for the Hanford Site in their current budget. The proposed cut is a total of $104 million, focusing on the DOE Office of River Protection who is responsible for overseeing the site.
It’s interesting to look back on the Hanford Site after almost 20 years and see that while much has changed, some things haven’t. As the workers and scientists who created the sprawling Hanford Site are no longer with us, a new generation of workers and scientists are left to pick up the pieces and figure out the best technologies and protocols to safely dispose the waste left behind.
To learn more about the current state of the Hanford cleanup, check out “A Glass Nightmare: Cleaning Up the Cold War’s Nuclear Legacy at Hanford,” by Maria Gallucci in IEEE Spectrum, April 2020. It was a great help in understanding the state of the cleanup.
