Hanford Site
Hanford Overview

Each year the Office of River Protection  and Richland Operations Office are required to prepare an annual budget submittal that is consistent with the Hanford Federal Facility Agreement and Consent Order, also known as the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA), and meets regulatory requirements.  The TPA is the regulatory framework between DOE, Washington State Department of Ecology, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that guides cleanup at the Hanford Site.  

 
The DOE has a three-year budget process.  DOE is currently working to the 2008 allocated budget, and the President recently released the 2009 budget request to Congress.  Based on 2008 and 2009 budget information, cleanup priorities, and input from the public, regulatory agencies, tribes, Hanford Advisory Board and others, DOE is formulating its 2010 budget requirements. 

 
It is important to the Tri-Party agencies to hear your input concerning Hanford cleanup and which projects or activities you believe should be clean up priorities in the development of the 2009 budget request.  Visit the public comment section of this website for more information on how to provide your input on your priorities, and how we should spend Hanford cleanup dollars.


History:
The Hanford Site is located in southeastern Washington State and is the country’s largest environmental cleanup project. With an annual budget of $2 billion dollars, the site has made significant progress cleaning up the legacy of former nuclear weapons production activities. Our cleanup strategy remains focused on removing the sources impacting the groundwater reducing the risk to the Columbia River and meeting our regulatory commitments. However, despite our recent successes a lot of tough work remains. Maintaining public support and project funding is vital to our success.

The U.S. Department of Energy has two offices at Hanford that are conducting cleanup activities. The Office of River Protection manages retrieval of waste and closure of the 177 underground waste tanks, and construction of a waste treatment plant that will turn radioactive and chemical waste into a stable glass form for disposal. The Richland Operations Office is responsible for cleaning up the balance of the Hanford weapons production legacy – spent nuclear fuel, remaining plutonium, all buried and solid wastes, and Hanford Site facilities large and small.

The Hanford Site is the largest of the three original defense production sites founded in WWII as part of the Manhattan Project. At 586 square miles, Hanford is about half the size of the state of Rhode Island. Over its 40 years of operations, Hanford produced about 64 metric tons of plutonium – nearly two thirds of all the plutonium produced for government purposes in the United States.

Between 1943 and 1963, nine plutonium production reactors were built along the Columbia River and five reprocessing facilities were built on the Central Plateau with more than 900 support facilities and radiological laboratories around the site. Until the late 1980s, plutonium and reusable uranium were separated from irradiated fuel, and the plutonium was exported to other DOE sites for use in nuclear weapons. About 40% of the approximately one billion curies of human-made radioactivity that exist across the nuclear weapons complex reside at Hanford.

Types/Quantities of waste/material/contamination/facilities at the site:

• 2,100 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel (80% of the irradiated uranium fuel in DOE’s inventory).
• 11 metric tons of plutonium in various forms at the Plutonium Finishing Plant, contained in the spent fuel at the K Reactor Basins, and in the spent fuel at the Fast Flux Test Facility.
• About 750,000 cubic meters of buried or stored solid waste in 175 waste trenches.
• About 1 trillion liters of groundwater contaminated above EPA drinking water standards, spread out over 80 square miles.  The contaminants include metals, chemicals, and radionuclides.
• 1,936 stainless-steel capsules of radioactive cesium and strontium, containing roughly 125 million curies of material in water-filled pools.
• More than 1,700 identified waste sites and 500 contaminated facilities
• More than 53 million gallons of liquid radioactive waste remain in 170 aging, underground single-shell tanks (7 single-shell tanks retrieved to date).

With the end of the plutonium production mission in the late 1980s, the Department of Energy’s Hanford mission has been focused solely on the cleanup of the cold war legacy.  Nuclear materials and contamination are being characterized, treated, and disposed. The Department’s vision is to clean up and shrink the site footprint from ~586 square miles to ~75 square miles.
To accomplish this, work is focused on cleaning up the Columbia River Corridor, which is expected to be complete by roughly 2015 and transitioning the Central Plateau from primarily waste storage areas to waste characterization, treatment, storage and disposal operations that are expected to go on for another 30 years.