The United States Department of Energy’s Hanford Site sits on 586-square-miles in the desert of southeastern Washington State. The area is home to nine former nuclear reactors and their associated processing facilities that were built beginning in 1943. The reactors were used to produce plutonium, a man-made, radioactive, chemical element which was needed for atomic weapons associated with America’s defense program during World War II and throughout the Cold War. Plutonium from Hanford was used in the Fat Man bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan in August of 1945 and helped to end World War II.
Hanford reactors produced plutonium from 1944 until 1987. Today, Hanford workers are involved in an environmental cleanup project of immense proportions necessitated by the processes required to transform raw uranium into plutonium for bombs. These processes generated billions of gallons of liquid waste and millions of tons of solid waste which must now be cleaned up, removed, or remediated.
In 1989, the Department of Energy joined with the Washington State Department of Ecology and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in signing the Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order more commonly known as the Tri-Party Agreement. This document outlines legally enforceable milestones for Hanford cleanup over the next several decades. The Tri-Party Agreement, also referred to as the TPA, is a living document that is regularly reviewed to confirm completion of milestone requirements or to make adjustments in scheduled dates when milestones are to be completed.
There are two local Department of Energy agencies associated with Hanford cleanup. The Richland Operations Office (RL) oversees the projects associated with cleaning up the reactors, the soil, the groundwater, and the solid waste burial sites. RL also manages the demolition of facilities, and the disposition of the remaining plutonium left on the Hanford Site. The Office of River Protection (ORP) is the agency tasked with managing the liquid and semi-solid nuclear and chemical waste that is currently stored in 177 underground tanks on the Site. ORP is also in charge of constructing the Waste Treatment Plant, a massive complex of structures located in central Hanford that will combine the wastes from these tanks with glass making materials in a process called vitrification. By vitrifying the waste, it makes the material more stable and allows for the waste to be safely stored in a permanent repository away from Hanford.
While there are less than 500 federal government employees who staff the three Department of Energy offices at Hanford, there are thousands of other workers at the Site who are employed by contractors or subcontractors of the three DOE offices.
