Fifty-six million gallons of leaky radioactive waste are buried in Washington State. Here’s what it takes to clean it up.
BY TIM NEWCOMB
The science of vitrification—turning liquid into glass—isn’t novel. But vitrifying 56 million gallons of highly radioactive nuclear waste into glass for long-term safe storage presents a tricky challenge that’s costing the United States billions of dollars and decades of time at the Hanford Nuclear Waste Site, the nation’s largest nuclear waste dump.
“Nothing I have ever done has prepared me for this,” says Rick Holmes, general manager for the Waste Treatment Completion Company —a joint operation of the construction giant Bechtel and the global infrastruce firm AECOM— working to build the plant creating the glass. “It is bigger, there are more things, and the complexity of the site factors in. The scale is a pretty significant leap.”
The U.S. Department of Energy, overseeing the cleanup of the 580-square-mile site in the barren landscape of southeast Washington State, is in the midst of a multi-decade plan to purge the site of our nuclear past.