In the scrub brush desert country of southeastern Washington, Bechtel National is building a nuclear waste treatment plant for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) at Hanford, site of the first and most extensive nuclear defense production program in the United States. It is one of the largest federal capital projects today, and one of the most critical environmental cleanup problems in the country. The goal is to stabilize 200 million liters of radioactive and chemical waste so it can be stored safely for more than 10,000 years—in other words, to put at least one nuclear genie back in the bottle.
The story began early in 1943, when residents of a sparsely populated area of Washington were evacuated and the Manhattan Project moved in to produce plutonium for a new weapon that would bring about a swift conclusion to World War II. In August 1945, the Hanford Engineer Works accomplished its mission when an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, ending World War II.
After the war, Hanford assumed a growing position in the U.S. defense program as the United States and the Soviet Union locked horns in the nuclear weapons buildup that defined the new Cold War. By 1964, nine plutonium production reactors were operating at the site, all of them on the banks of the Columbia River.
Plutonium production was stopped permanently after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. But the Herculean problem of cleaning up and storing the nuclear waste from nearly 50 years of weapons production lives on. These millions of liters of radioactive and chemical waste are stored in 177 underground tanks built from the 1940s to the 1980s. The tanks were designed to last 20 years. Radioactive waste has leaked from many of the tanks, contaminating the groundwater and potentially threatening the Columbia River and millions of people downstream in Portland, Oregon, and other cities. It is this tank waste that the new waste treatment plant will process and immobilize for safe long-term storage.
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