Federal officials say they won’t ship new waste to the Hanford Nuclear Reservation until 2019. That’s according to the preferred alternative in the Department of Energy’s new 6,000 page cleanup plan released yesterday. Richland Correspondent Anna King has details.

The reason this document is important is because it outlines how the federal government plans to deal with some of the most caustic radioactive waste on earth. For one, the new plan says the federal government won’t in any more radioactive waste to Hanford, while it builds a massive factory called the vit plant over the next 10 years. The factory is designed to treat 53 million gallons of stewing radioactive sludge stored in leak-prone underground tanks. Erik Olds is a spokesman for the Department of Energy. He says the feds also want to clean up 99 percent of the waste in those tanks, and then leave them where they are.

Olds: “Of course what that means is closing the tanks in their current state which is in the ground after we’ve finished our retrieval operations.”

Still, big questions remain. For example what to do with the majority of the low level radioactive waste that’s not headed to the vit plant. The federal government is taking public comment on the new plan until mid-March.

Copyright 2009 Northwest Public Radio

On the web: Additional information about the Draft Tank Closure and Waste Management EIS

Information about the ongoing cleanup mission at the Hanford Site

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