A 2021 aerial photo of Hanford’s 200 Area, which houses the tanks and under-construction Waste Treatment Plant, in southeast Washington. (Credit: U.S. Department of Energy) Listen (Runtime 1:01) Read There […]Read More
The poured glass appears emerald green, just before it’s lidded and transported to an export bay at Hanford in southeast Washington. Hanford officials are celebrating this first container of glass […]Read More
The last in-person public meeting about Hanford cleanup was in Richland in 2019. (Courtesy of Washington State Department of Ecology) Listen (Runtime :56) Read The public can ask questions and […]Read More
David Turk, federal Deputy Secretary of Energy, speaks to about 100 people during an informational meeting about potential clean energy development at Hanford. (Credit: Anna King / Northwest News Network) […]Read More
Workers walk at the end of the workday on the site of a facility being constructed to treat nuclear waste, Thursday, June 2, 2022, during a tour of the Hanford […]Read More
Recorrido en bote por el río Columbia durante el “Hanford Journey”, para celebrar la defensa de la limpieza. Crédito: Bear Sky Media. Read A medida que el presupuesto para limpieza […]Read More
People take boat tours throught the Columbia River during the Hanford Journey, to celebrate cleanup advocacy. Credit: Bear Sky Media. Read As the Hanford cleanup budget has been reduced in […]Read More
Some people work their whole life trying to solve one big problem. That was the case with geoscientist John Zachara, who studied Hanford. Correspondent Anna King has this remembrance of the scientist who died recently from a rare form of blood cancer.Read More
At Hanford, a hazardous concoction of radioactive waste and chemicals sits in World War II and Cold War-era tanks. Now one of those old tanks has a serious leak. Read More
As President Donald Trump prepared to leave office, his Department of Energy was celebrating that a new analytical lab was “ready to operate” at the Hanford Site in southeast Washington.Read More
David Bowen has owned his own bar in Cle Elum, been a Kittitas County commissioner and managed groundwater nitrate cleanup in the Yakima Valley. Now, he’ll hold the U.S. Department of Energy accountable for its cleanup at the site using the Tri-Party Agreement. That’s a 1989 document struck between Ecology, the federal Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Read More
The report from the independent Government Accountability Office says the U.S. Department of Energy has not found the root causes of the partial collapse of the waste-storage tunnel, and that failures in DOE’s investigation, inspections and maintenance of other aging and contaminated facilities is concerning.Read More
Washington Department of Ecology leaders say without access to this data, they can’t effectively protect the land, air and water for residents in eastern Washington and surrounding communities. They say they’ve attempted to negotiate this issue with federal Energy managers for years.Read More
Federal watchdogs are looking into all types of parts at a $17 billion construction project at the Hanford Nuclear Site. The Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Energy has found a sample of parts going into a large waste treatment plant at Hanford had problems.Read More
The project to stabilize and seal a large tunnel of radioactive waste has been completed at the Hanford nuclear reservation, according to the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractor. The so-called Tunnel 2 project started in October 2018, at the massive Washington cleanup site near Richland.Read More
The partial government shutdown is blocking some of important oversight at Hanford. In the past 10 years, the Environmental Protection Agency office in Richland has shrunk from nearly 10 experts working on Hanford issues to just three – including the top manager. Read More
Keeping the Columbia River safe is at the core of several public meetings scheduled for Seattle and Portland next week. It all has to do with decisions being made hundreds of miles away in the desert at Hanford. The question regulators are tacking: How do you keep a mostly-empty radioactive waste tank safe for hundreds, thousands even a million years? Read More
Last week, the state of Washington, a Hanford union and a Hanford watchdog organization said they have tentatively settled a three-year old lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy over workers being made sick from toxic vapors from Hanford’s underground tanks.Read More
A federal watchdog agency said Wednesday that it's hard to prove that Hanford’s Waste Treatment Plant is safe. Read More
The U.S. Department of Energy is launching a federal investigation into a demolition site at the Hanford nuclear reservation where radioactive waste from the site has been spreading in unexplained ways.Read More
Northwest senators had a lot of questions for U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry during a Senate committee hearing Tuesday. They grilled him on the safety of steel in a massive treatment plant under construction at the Hanford nuclear site.Read More
Prompt communication between workers and management at the Plutonium Finishing Plant did not occur, so radioactive waste continued to spread at Hanford. That’s according to a new report.Read More
The National Academy of Sciences is conducting days of meetings in Richland, Washington, this week. On the agenda is what to do with a lot of liquid radioactive waste at the Hanford Nuclear Site.Read More
Hanford workers have called a “stop work” at a demolition site over worries of radioactive contamination inside government vehicles. It’s the same site where government contractors have struggled to tame the spread of contamination all winter. Read More
Reaction in the Northwest was swift to President Trump’s proposed cuts to the cleanup budget at the Hanford Site. The budget request cuts $61 million from the budget for Hanford's Office of River Protection, and $169 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Richland Operations Office.Read More
Washington health officials have penned an uncommonly stern letter to the U.S. Department of Energy. It details concerns over the radioactive contamination spread at a Hanford demolition site.Read More
Radioactive waste keeps spreading at a demolition site at Hanford. This week officials have found more contamination on a worker’s boot, on a work trailer and a personal vehicle. Now, a rental car that’s possibly contaminated has ended up in Spokane.Read More
After nearly two decades of work, contractors at Hanford have just finished cleaning out the first of 177 radioactive waste tanks. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY Listen A major milestone […]Read More
TOBIN FRICKE / WIKIMEDIA – TINYURL.COM/H99DL7H Listen The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is one of the government watchdogs monitoring the cleanup of the Hanford nuclear reservation. But recently the […]Read More
File photo of Tunnel 1 under construction. This is the tunnel that collapsed in May. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY Listen At the Hanford Site, the job to seal in […]Read More
Hanford workers place a metal box into the soil covering the collapsed portion of Tunnel 1 at Hanford. Grout pipes will be installed through that metal box, down inside […]Read More
