Hanford Will Lock Up Nuclear Waste In Glass — If The White House Lets It

"Hanford vitrification plant set to open but some fear Trump officials are pushing for a cheaper alternative" 

"After decades of delays, one of the world’s most polluted places is finally set to get a little cleaner. Next month, workers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Hanford site are scheduled to open a multibillion-dollar facility that would begin to entomb radioactive waste in thousands of glass logs, which would then be buried elsewhere. It would be a major milestone in the cleanup of nuclear weapons waste currently held in corroding tanks. But amid signs of upheaval at DOE’s cleanup office, state and local officials are worried the White House may be delaying the project at the eleventh hour and trying to shift to an approach that is faster and cheaper but perhaps not as foolproof: locking up waste in cement-like grout.

“We’re concerned about the rumors because we are so very close to, for the first time ever, meaningfully reducing the volume of waste at Hanford’s tanks,” says David Reeploeg, vice president for federal programs at the Tri-City Development Council, an economic development nonprofit representing towns flanking the federal site in Washington state.

From World War II through the Cold War, Hanford engineers made the plutonium for thousands of nuclear bombs, including the one dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. Some 325 million liters of liquid waste from this process—enough to fill 85 Olympic swimming pools—was funneled into 177 buried carbon steel tanks. Some tanks have corroded, and an estimated 3.7 million liters of toxic, radioactive waste have leaked into the ground, threatening to contaminate groundwater that flows into the nearby Columbia River."