The Hanford Nuclear Reservation was established in 1943 in south central Washington State. The plutonium that was used in World War II to bomb Nagasaki, Japan was produced at the Reservation. During the Cold War, most of the plutonium for the sixty thousand nuclear warheads in the U.S. arsenal was produced at Hanford by the nine reactors and the five plutonium processing facilities constructed on the site.
       Nuclear weapons production at Hanford was halted in 1987. Fifty-three million gallons of high-level radioactive waste were left behind by these activities and remain at Hanford in underground tanks, some of which have been leaking.
       The high-level radioactive liquid waste at Hanford contains transuranic materials which are man-made unstable radioactive elements such as plutonium that are beyond the natural occurring elements in the periodic table. They will be dangerously radioactive for thousands of years.
       The Idaho National Laboratory in south east Idaho was established by the U.S. federal government in 1949 to be a center for nuclear research. Over the years, fifty experimental reactors have been constructed at the INL. Such research continues today with plans to construct one of the first commercial small modular reactors at the INL.
       There are more transuranic wastes at the INL than any other federal facility. This waste includes work clothing, rags, machine parts and tools that have been contaminated with plutonium and other radioactive elements. There have been court battles between the State of Idaho and the U.S. Department of Energy over the radioactive waste at the INL site. In 1995 an agreement was reached which required the DoE to clean up the INL site. The Advanced Mixed Waste Treatment Project (AMWTP) was constructed to deal with transuranic wastes.
       The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad New Mexico was opened in 1999 to receive solid transuranic waste from facilities around the U.S. which had been used for research and development of nuclear warheads. A few years ago, an accident closed the WIPP for several years, but it is now back in operation.
        The AMWTP at the INL was set up to compact and solidify transuranic wastes which could then be shipped to the WIPP for disposal. The AMWTP is just finishing up the processing of eighty-five thousand cubic yards of transuranic wastes for shipment to the WIPP. The DoE has just announced that the AMWTP will be closed next year.
       There have been proposals for keeping the AMWTP open to process liquid transuranic wastes from other national laboratories and other facilities used in the development of nuclear warheads with most of the waste coming from Hanford. A thirty-eight page economic analysis from the DoE was just released that said that “it does not appear to be cost effective due to packaging and transportation challenges in shipping waste” to Idaho.
      Currently, there are efforts to reclassify some of the high-level radioactive waste at Hanford to low-level radioactive waste. This would allow some of the waste currently stored in disintegrating underground tanks to remain in the tanks. The tanks would be topped off with grout and permanently buried. This might result in leakage of some wastes into the Columbia River. Unfortunately, the better solution of treatment at the INL and shipment to WIPP seems to be dead.