Hanford Cleanup Milestone Reached

Some 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel has been removed from unde rwater storage at the Hanford Site in Washington state, the Department of Energy announced on Oct. 22. DOE has been under great pressure from the state to clean up the spent fuel waste, which has been left in old, degrading canisters in huge, leaking, water-filled pools in the site's K-Basin area along the Columbia River. In all, some 105,000 individual fuel elements totaling 50 million curies of spent fuel have been repackaged into sealed 14-foot-canisters and shipped to an on-site storage facility for eventual transfer to an underground high-level radioactive waste repository (C&EN, June 10, 2002, page 24). Still to come, however, are removal of water and sludge left in the basins and their closure, which is planned for 2009.