The 20-year war over Hanford clean-up

Late last month, after a 20-month hiatus, Bechtel construction crews resumed work on the huge vitrification plant at the Hanford Site in Eastern Washington with a 350-yard concrete pour. No one outside the nearby Tri-Cities of Richland, Kennewick, and Pasco paid much attention. That's bizarre. Not only is Hanford the most contaminated nuclear-waste site in the hemisphere, if not the world, it's the Pacific Northwest's main claim to historic significance. Forget Lewis and Clark. Hanford is the site of the first plutonium factory in human history - and history's first big producer of high-level nuclear waste.

The late physicist Alvin Weinberg, who worked on the Manhattan Project as a young man and later ran the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, once said that our commitment to store plutonium waste for its 10,000-year half life was unlike anything in recent human history, except, perhaps, Hitler's instruction to his architect, Albert Speer, to design buildings that would last throughout the reign of the Thousand Year Reich.

We blundered somewhat unthinkingly into that commitment at Hanford during World War II. More than half a century later, we're still coming to grips with it.

The Hanford "vit plant" will mix radioactive waste with borosilicate glass, which will in theory be shipped to the national nuclear waste repository at Nevada's Yucca Mountain. (Plans for the Yucca Mountain site received another potential setback last month when scientists discovered that an earthquake fault ran under an area in which plant designers had planned to pour concrete pads for the temporary storage of high-level radioactive waste before it is entombed in tunnels deep within the mountain.)

The federal Department of Energy agreed to build the vit plant in an amendment to the Tri-Party Agreement it signed with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington Department of Ecology back in 1989. Under the terms of the Tri-Party Agreement, the plant should be up and running by 2011. It won't be. Some observers aren't sure it will ever turn radioactive waste into glass.

The delay clearly violates the Tri-Party Agreement. The state is negotiating with the feds about what happens next. If the feds propose more action on some other significant front, the state might back off. If the feds don't, the state might sue. Either way, that vit plant won't be completed on schedule.

"What is amazing to me," Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden said in March, "is that DOE has now been trying to clean up the nuclear waste and environmental contamination for half as long as the site was actually in operation – more than 20 years – with no end in sight. We are now coming up on the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Tri-Party Agreement between DOE, the State of Washington, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that was supposed to set specific, enforceable milestones for the clean-up.

"And where are we?" Wyden asked rhetorically. In addition to the delays and cost overruns, "the plan still leaves no solution for more than half of the so-called low-activity waste that is supposed to be removed from the tanks and which also has to be vitrified. There's still no plan for dealing with the waste that has leaked out of the tanks. There's still no plan for dealing with strontium and cesium capsules that have been retrieved from all over the country."

The Hanford vitrification plant will be the world's largest. No other plant has handled so much waste. None has handled waste contaminated by such a wide and poorly understood assortment of elements.

The nature of the waste casts doubt over the whole enterprise. The American Chemical Society's Environmental Science and Technology journal reported in 2002:

Hanford's waste is especially problematic because much of it has been only partially characterized, leaving many of its constituents unidentified. ... Cyanide, nitrate, and chromium compounds ... lurk in the tanks along with an alphabet soup of radioisotopes. In fact, Hanford waste now contains every element in the periodic table, says Pacific Northwest National Laboratories chemist John Vienna. ...

The vitrification processes being used to treat Hanford's radioactive waste have tweaked [the traditional glassmaking] formula because ... many of the elements and compounds in the waste can interfere with glassmaking. For example, chromium, ruthenium, rhodium, and palladium can precipitate out of the glass melt and short-circuit the melter electrodes. Chromium, phosphorus oxide, and sodium sulfate dissolve poorly in borosilicate glass, sometimes forming refractory crystalline phases that can corrode the melter lining, clog the outflow of the glass melt to the canisters, and compromise the homogeneity and chemical durability of the finished product.

Thomas Carpenter of the Government Accountability Project suggests that the plant may never be completed. "I have questions whether the plant is going to work at all," he says, much less by the current deadline. Among other things, he points to the recent discovery of two- or three-times-higher than anticipated levels of aluminum and other metals that might create flaws in the borosilicate glass, which he said has touched off "a scramble to redesign."