Hanford Workers Remove Radioactive Waste From 21st Large Underground Tank

From 1944 to 1989, Hanford produced 74 tons of plutonium for the country's nuclear weapons program. To store the radioactive and chemical byproducts, the site built thick, reinforced concrete tanks lined inside with steel and buried under several feet of soil to shield workers from radiation. The tanks held up to a million gallons each, and when production stopped at the end of the Cold War, 56 million gallons of waste was in 177 of the large tanks.

EM and its contractors are moving the waste out of the older tanks with a single steel liner into newer tanks that have a second liner for leak protection. Those tanks will feed the waste to the nearby Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant that will treat the waste for safe disposal starting next year.

To empty the 21st tank, contractor Washington River Protection Solutions, supported by other Hanford contractors, removed about 350,000 gallons of waste from the million-gallon single shell Tank AX-101.