Transforming nuclear waste to glass: Hanford cleanup plans take a step forward

In Central Washington, a big problem sits in the lap of the U.S. Department of Energy: 56 million gallons of nuclear waste are lying underground in steel tanks at the Hanford nuclear site. The tanks are old and prone to leaking.

After four years of closed door negotiations, the Department of Energy, Environmental Protection Agency, and Washington State Department of Ecology put forward a new plan to handle that waste, which involves turning it into glass via a process called vitrification.

"You need to shrink that waste into something that can be easily handled, that is durable, and can be stored somewhere," said Ashutosh Goel, a material engineering professor at Rutgers University who works on solutions to messes like Hanford.

"That's where glass comes in."

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In the vitrification process, liquid waste is mixed with small glass beads. Then, that mixture is heated to over 2,000 degrees. The final product is a sheet of glass.

Goel said turning liquid waste into glass decreases the volume of waste making it easier to handle.

"It's not only the shrinking of volume, but also the high chemical durability. Now we can safely store it in a geological repository somewhere at a suitable place in the future," he said.

The first clean test glass to come out of the Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant was poured last year.

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But get the vitrification plant at Hanford up and running has taken decades and plans to convert the waste have hit delay after delay.

There are technical challenges dogging the project: Turning nuclear waste into glass isn’t easy, and there have been numerous construction issues at the vitrification plant.

There are also political challenges.

In 2020, the government agencies involved with cleanup went into closed door negotiations to find a path forward. At the time, the state of Washington said the federal government couldn’t meet its legal obligations to clean up the site.

This new plan keeps deadlines for vitrification that were set in a 2010 consent decree.

"It would require the least radioactive waste treatment by vitrification to begin next year," said Annette Cary, a senior staff reporter at the Tri City Herald and covers Hanford. " But the Department of Energy would still have until 2033 to vitrify the highest level radioactive waste."

Listen to Soundside’s full conversation with Annette Cary by clicking the play icon at the top of this story.