Hanford Nuclear Waste to Be Pumped, Treated

摘要

Millions of gallons of nuclear waste left over from World War II and the cold war will soon be removed from decaying underground tanks at the U.S. Department of Energy's Hanford Site, in eastern Washington State, and transformed into glass. CH2M HILL, headquartered in Englewood, Colorado, is designing several pipelines to remove the nuclear waste from the tanks and transport it to a large-scale complex of treatment facilities designed by Bechtel National, a division of San Francisco-based Bechtel, where it will be transformed into glass through a process known as vitrification. The firms are working under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy. The waste is the product of 50 years of plutonium production at the 560 sq mi (1,450 km~2) Hanford Site. In 1989, at the end of the cold war, the site became available for remediation. Today, it includes several dormant reactors and storage facilities as well as 177 underground tanks filled with 52 million gal (196 million L) of radioactive nuclear waste. Some of the tanks date back to the Manhattan Project—the top-secret project undertaken by the United States under the direction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to develop the atomic bomb. These tanks have outlived their design lifetime by 30 to 40 years, and several have been found to be leaking waste into the ground, posing a threat to groundwater and the nearby Columbia River.