Hanford Seeks Short‐ and Long‐Term Solutions to its Legacy of Waste

The 560 square miles of desert occupied by the Hanford Site in southeastern Washington are strewn with the silent hulks of reactors and processing plants that once produced plutonium for nuclear weapons. Lurking beneath the surface is the legacy of those plants—nearly 50 years' accumulation of chemical and nuclear waste, including over 60% by volume of the nation's high‐level radioactive waste from weapons production. Some of the wastes will remain sequestered from the general public long enough to allow research on the best longrange solution to the problem of their disposal. But others require immediate action. Among the most urgent are the 177 million‐gallon storage tanks for high‐level wastes, some of which contain potentially explosive mixtures of chemicals.