Pacific Northwest National Lab scientist and Hanford manager on radioactive tank waste, vitrification and clean-up progress

In September 2024, we packed up our van and drove about four and a half hours from Portland to Richland, WA, to set up a mobile broadcast studio on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities, in partnership with Northwest Public Broadcasting. We broadcast a week of shows that included conversations about the WW II and Manhattan Project history that created the radioactive waste from war-time plutonium enrichment at Hanford. Our coverage from the region also included in-depth interviews with Indigenous leaders and a tour of the infamous B-reactor, along with conversations about the economy and culture of the region.

We listen back today to two of these conversations. The first is with Carolyn Pearce, a PhD and chemist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory working on the science of the  vitrification, the glassification process that will be used to turn some of the 56 million gallons of radioactive waste  into radioactive glass logs for storage.

In the second half of the show, we revisit our tour of one part of the Hanford nuclear reservation. The 56 million gallons of waste are stored in 177 massive, underground tanks on 18 different “farms.”  Most of the tanks are single-shelled, but 28 of them are double-shelled, which helps prevent waste from getting into the ground. Karthik Subramanian, chief operating officer of Washington River Protection Solutions, the tank farm operations contractor, was our guide. After the tour, we sat down with Brian Vance, who at that time was the Department of Energy’s top manager in charge of Hanford. He resigned in March of this year. Vance talked with us about tank integrity, the status of the vitrification plant and the overall clean up progress. The opening of that waste processing facility -- which has now cost $30 billion  - was thrown into doubt earlier this month, but the Department of Energy is now allowing the project to move forward and the first glass logs are expected to roll out as soon as this week, ahead of the October 15 deadline.