RICHLAND -- At the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, the stopwatch is always running.
The race against time began in 1943, when the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor rose from the tumbleweeds here, and scientists rushed to build the A-bomb before the Nazis.
Almost 60 years later, the stopwatch is still ticking.
Old reactor fuel sits just 400 yards from the Columbia River in Southeastern Washington, corroding in giant "swimming pools" that are well past their life expectancy. And Hanford's greatest environmental threat -- millions of gallons of highly radioactive waste -- still fills underground, leak-prone tanks, some as large as Olympia's Capitol dome.
Also beneath the ground, vast amounts of tainted water are advancing like sinister blobs toward the river, and scientists are scrambling to figure out how to stop it.
Adding to the time pressure, it's uncertain how much longer the public and Congress will be willing to pump money into the U.S. Department of Energy site before they decide to padlock the gates and walk away. Some $35 billion has been spent on the cleanup to date -- enough to keep the city of Seattle running for nearly two decades.
It'll cost at least $50 billion more to get the job done, an effort that will span another generation, according to the latest estimates. But success hinges on successfully implementing technology never before used on such a grand scale, even as contractors concede their plans are incomplete and government officials keep changing the goals.
After 13 years focused on cleanup, the next few months could bring a breakthrough for Hanford, even some skeptics agree. Almost half of the spent fuel is supposed to be moved to safe storage, and construction should begin this fall on a massive treatment plant that aims to trap the most radioactive tank waste in a stable glass form.
"This really is a watershed year," said Harry Boston, manager of DOE's Office of River Protection. "A lot of hard work has been done over many years and now we are in a position to reap the rewards."
But as always with Hanford, there are no guarantees. Boston, a widely respected leader in the cleanup, is being transferred this summer by top DOE officials. Those same officials recently started backing away from promises to turn all of the waste to glass, fueling environmentalists' fears about the future of the 586-square-mile reservation.
"We were about to take a small step forward and got hit by a baseball bat by the Bush administration knocking us far backwards," said Gerald Pollet, director of Heart of America Northwest, a Hanford watchdog group.
Over more than 40 years, Hanford produced enough weapons- and fuel-grade plutonium to fill a cube measuring 5 feet on each side.
A baseball-sized chunk was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945, helping to end World War II. Stopping only at the end of the Cold War in 1991, Hanford created two-thirds of the nation's plutonium supply. Atom by atom, the stockpile grew -- and so did the damage.
More than 140 million curies of radiation spewed into the air, was poured into the desert, buried in the sand and dumped into the Columbia. By comparison, the 1986 meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was mild -- releasing about 50 million, mostly short-lived curies. The 1979 accident at Three Mile Island unleashed 50 curies.
The impact of a curie -- a unit of radioactivity -- varies by element, but exposure to even a fraction of a single curie of strontium-90 or iodine-129, both of which contaminate Hanford's groundwater, dramatically increases the risk of getting cancer.
Today, decades later, the human toll is still being tallied. At the height of Hanford's nuclear production, thousands of workers were exposed to dangerous doses of radiation, and thousands more "downwinders" claim they were unwitting victims of secret radiation releases, such as the infamous "Green Run" when 8,000 curies of iodine-131 were intentionally released in a 1949 experiment.
"We didn't know what levels were harmful," said Dr. Tim Takaro, assistant environmental-health professor at the University of Washington. But he added: "If they would have erred on the side of caution, then you would not have released iodine-131 up the stacks."
Looking back, it's hard to understand why Hanford workers handled the waste so irresponsibly, burdening future generations with a cleanup that currently costs an average of $5.1 million a day.
In the early years, defense-minded scientists probably "thought that a smart scientist would come along right behind them" to figure out how to safely treat the waste, said Michele Gerber, author of "On the Home Front: The Cold War Legacy of the Hanford Nuclear Site."
Instead, the environment became a dumping ground. The practice continued through the ‘70s, with DOE insisting it was exempt from the nation's toxic-waste crackdown.
It took until 1989 for federal and state officials to agree to clean up the nation's largest radioactive waste site. In the Tri-Party Agreement, the DOE, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Ecology set timelines for cleanup and standards that had to be achieved.
The pace for cleanup was finally set, the finish line roughly established. The "course" runs from sludge-filled underground tanks to basins filled with old uranium fuel rods, and from the site of the treatment plant to the river's edge.
Tank farms: Turning poison into glass
It's a place that often looks and feels as remote as the surface of the moon, but Hanford's central plateau is suddenly bustling.
Hundreds of workers are moving enough soil to fill Seattle's 42-floor Smith Tower four times. They're digging massive craters that will soon be home to facilities that will "vitrify" -- or turn into a glass substance resembling volcanic obsidian -- 53 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in underground tanks.
Since 1956, Hanford officials have known the tanks were leaking, though it wasn't publicly admitted for nearly 20 years. More than a million gallons of waste wound up seeping into the soil.
It's now the most important project at Hanford and the largest at any DOE cleanup site in the nation. And there's finally reason for optimism: Ground was broken on the treatment plant last fall.
"The tank farm is no longer the end of the line where things go to die," Boston said. "It's now the front end of the largest chemical-processing facility in the world."
What is now tank waste was created during Hanford's heyday in chemical treatments used to separate plutonium from irradiated reactor fuel. Not knowing what to do with the lethal stew, workers pumped it into steel tanks. Waste was later transferred between tanks, and truckloads of chemicals were added to stabilize the material and reduce corrosion.
That created one of the biggest challenges facing cleanup contractors: How to take some 40 nasty varieties of radioactive waste and make it safe for long-term storage.
"We have created a very chemically complex brew at this site that is different than anywhere else in the world," said Roy Gephart, program manager with Richland's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a government-funded, independently operated research lab.
Buried under 10 feet of soil, the 177 tanks don't look like much. Organized into clusters called "farms," the orderly yellow manhole covers and pipes belie the mix of radioactive liquids, sludge and solid salt formations below.
Like a horror movie in which the would-be victim stumbles and falls as the monster closes in, DOE has tried time and again to initiate programs to process the waste. The stumbles have cost taxpayers $3.5 billion in the last decade alone, records show.
It started in 1958, when Hanford officials began exploring turning tank waste into a ceramic form. The $25 million plan was scrapped.
In the late ‘80s, a decision was made to vitrify and turn waste into grout, but the plan was abandoned when the stability of the grout was called into question. In 1998, a contract privatizing the vitrification project was signed. But DOE fired British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. in 2000 when cost estimates doubled.
Despite the setbacks, work on the foundation for the vitrification plant is currently under way. Once treated, the melted glass, which will still be radioactive, will be poured into canisters to harden. Highly radioactive waste is supposed to go to a national repository, once a site is chosen and one is built. Less dangerous waste will be buried at Hanford.
Most of the retrievable liquid waste in the oldest decaying tanks has been pumped into double-shelled vessels. More than a million gallons will be transferred this year, leaving 700,000 gallons to be moved in 2003. That, however, doesn't fully empty the tanks -- or eliminate the environmental threat. Thirty-two million gallons of radioactive solid material and sludge will remain.
Despite the progress already made, critics say the $4 billion vitrification project could still be tripped up.
Bechtel National Inc. -- the company hired to do the job after British Nuclear Fuels was fired -- and DOE have come under fire for the piecemeal approach that allows construction to begin before all of the designs are completed. Bechtel defends this design-as-you-go process, known as "staged construction," as allowing them to work faster and incorporate new technology.
It's been done on other projects successfully undertaken by the international company, Bechtel officials said. They stand to earn a maximum of $600 million for the 10-year Hanford contract, but the amount decreases for missed deadlines and cost overruns.
But Robert Alvarez of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C., former senior policy advisor to the secretary of Energy, is skeptical of what he calls "the ready, shoot, aim approach."
"DOE has been in a rush to build big monuments before they know if these things will actually work," he said.
Treatment of the foulest waste must begin by 2007, according to Tri-Party Agreement deadlines. By 2018, 10 percent of the waste by volume, 25 percent by radioactivity, is to be vitrified. Ninety-nine percent of the waste is to be turned to glass by 2028. A new contract will cover continued operations beginning in 2011.
Once processing begins, the trickiest portion of getting the waste stabilized is expected to be "pre-treatment," or separation of waste into its constituent parts. That isolates the waste that will be radioactive for a long time from material that decays more quickly.
In tests, Bechtel researchers have successfully vitrified small amounts of tank waste.
Ron Naventi, Bechtel National's vice president and manager of the vitrification project, is confident of large-scale success, calling the technology "well-proven."
But before a single drop has been encased in glass, DOE is already talking about scaling back the project in favor of what they hope will be a faster, cheaper alternative.
Earlier this year, Jessie Roberson, the agency's nuclear waste-cleanup czar, said she wanted only 25 percent of the most radioactive waste vitrified. Roberson hasn't backed off those statements, despite objections from state officials and environmentalists.
"That's not cleanup," said Washington Attorney General Christine Gregoire, lead negotiator of the Tri-Party Agreement. "Cleanup is removing the waste and removing the tanks unless we get some new technology that I can't see right now."
In February, two environmental groups and the Yakama Indian Nation filed a federal suit to force DOE to remove all of the waste from the tanks at Hanford and two other sites. Removal is required by federal law, though DOE has reclassified some of the waste, which could allow leaving it in tanks. A response from DOE is expected later this month.
Bechtel is soliciting proposals to do tests with another type of treatment called "steam reformation." About two-thirds of the less-radioactive waste would be heated in a process that binds the radioactive material and sulfur waste in a solid form. Organic compounds and nitrates turn to gas or salt. The radioactive solids, depending on their hardness and solubility, could be stored in canisters or added to grout for long-term storage.
Steam-reforming could save money by reducing the scope of the vitrification project, DOE officials say.
Naventi expects to know if the technique works on Hanford waste by the end of the year. If it does, a pilot project using larger volumes of non-radioactive waste will start next year.
"Until we get a vitrification plant built and get some of the waste out of the ground, I don't think the cleanup can be viewed as successful," said Dennis Faulk, a regional manager for the EPA. "Until we get the plant going, everything else gets dwarfed."
The basins: Potential for catastrophe
The metal grating suspended over 20 million curies of fuel -- submerged under 16 feet of water -- jiggles unnervingly underfoot.
Drop a pen or earring into one of the two nearly Olympic-sized pools and it joins 2,000 tons of highly radioactive, corroding fuel that awaits removal.
The water, lit from below in an eerie glow, is needed to shield workers from the radiation and prevent the fuel from igniting. If exposed to air, there is potential for the uranium fuel rods that have lost their protective coating and the fine bits of uranium to react with oxygen and catch fire.
The pools are 30 years past their intended lifespan and have leaked more than 15 million gallons of contaminated water. Located down the plateau from the tank farms, they're on the banks of the Hanford Reach, the 51-mile undammed stretch of the Columbia River and a designated national monument.
Removing the fuel from the basins -- K East and K West -- is one of the most urgent projects here. Watchdog groups worry that a terrorist attack or an accident could release a surge of radioactive water and allow the fuel to ignite.
"You don't need a bomb," said Pollet. "If you drain the water, you have a catastrophe."
Like much of the cleanup at Hanford, dealing with the spent fuel required new technology and facing risks never dealt with before. Workers must remotely manipulate it with underwater arms, washing away organic material and sludge to prevent chemical reactions that could occur in storage.
The fuel is then packed into metal baskets, placed into canisters and stored in 40-foot-deep vaults until it can be moved to a still-to-be-named national waste repository, possibly Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
The $1.6 billion project, which has blown deadlines and racked up stiff penalties for safety violations, has been making progress, recently setting a record for the most fuel moved in a week. Since December 2000, more than 14 percent of the fuel has been removed from the basins. The goal is to get nearly half done by the end of this year, the rest by July 2004.
Plans are under way to build a transfer station so the fuel in the east basin, which is more contaminated, can be moved to the cleaner pool for processing. Then there's the 1,600 cubic feet of sludge made up of eroded concrete and corroded fuel that will need to be packed up. How it will be ultimately treated is unknown.
Another uncertainty comes from the budget, which still isn't fully funded for next year.
An additional $28 million needs to be added to the $90 million that the Bush administration requested for the basin project. DOE's project manager, Larry Earley, said the agency has been assured that money for the project has been secured. But he added: "You can only be reassured so much until that check is actually in your hands."
The checks won't keep coming for the basin project or anything else at Hanford unless pressure is continually put on the DOE, state officials and watchdog groups agree.
"We will lose the war over there the day the media, the average citizen and our delegation become disinterested in this issue," Gregoire said. "The only way we're going to get this done is if the citizens of the state of Washington hold the DOE accountable."
The old reactors: Horrors in the sand
Like archaeologists on a bountiful desert dig, Hanford workers have repeatedly unearthed surprises from the past.
But instead of finding gems and treasures, they've been shocked to discover spent reactor fuel and hundreds of barrels filled with flammable uranium shavings. They were buried in a 20-foot-deep trench and forgotten.
They're relics of a culture that made production of nuclear warheads a priority over waste-management and record-keeping -- of a society that let the government operate unquestioned, behind closed doors.
Four years after the discovery, work started this week April 15 on excavating the barrels and moving them to a permanent storage site away from the river. The project is expected to be completed by January.
Occasionally, workers stumble upon a welcomed memento.
During the cleanup of H Reactor, the fourth of nine built along the river, workers discovered a chalk drawing of a naked woman on a brick wall. Based on her hairstyle, it's guessed that she was created in the late 1940s -- probably by some lonely heart whiling away hours in an anteroom.
Alas, the "Painted Lady" will be blown apart when the reactor is "cocooned," a process in which the reactor core is left inside while all entrances into the building are cemented shut, a new roof goes on the building and adjoining buildings and fuel basins are cleaned and demolished.
Only C Reactor has completed the process so far. The hulking cement building looks something like a Monopoly game hotel with one side partly cut away. Seven other reactors are scheduled to be cocooned by 2012 at a projected total cost of $102 million, not including the newest reactor, for which cost estimates are not done.
B Reactor, the world's first, will be left open for at least the next few years, until a decision is made whether to preserve it as a museum. Most of the reactors were shut down in the mid-1960s and left in various states of disarray.
Another part of the cleanup is removing 10 million tons of contaminated soil to prevent radioactive material from leaching into the Columbia River. When the reactors were in operation, the contaminated water used to cool the cores was pumped into soil near the facilities or straight into the river. Solid waste was buried in shallow trenches.
So far, 3.3 million tons of soil have been moved inland to the center of the reservation, dumped in an enormous trench lined with plastic and clay to prevent toxins from seeping out.
"It's a very rudimentary approach. ... They keep taking scoops until they get a clean one," said Todd Martin, chairman of the Hanford Advisory Board, an organization responsible for cleanup oversight.
Still, he's pleased to see the risk to the river lessening.
"It's a little bit crude," he said, "but it allows them to take action without pushing a lot of paper."
Groundwater: Columbia in peril
Across the desert, underground chemical "nets" are cast in a race to capture polluted groundwater flowing toward the Columbia.
The river is an important source of irrigation water, drinking water for nearby Richland, and the spawning site of the river's largest population of wild , fall chinook.
But some of the contaminants are too tricky to trap and trying to stem the flow of polluted water spanning an area larger than the city of Seattle is a Herculean task. There have been successes in the groundwater-treatment plan, but overall it's been criticized as unfocused and lacking specific goals.
"We don't have our act together with respect to groundwater," Mike Gearheard, EPA director of the Environmental Cleanup Office, said at a public meeting earlier this year in Richland.
More than 400 billion gallons of contaminated wastewater was dumped at Hanford over the last half-century -- enough to fill Seattle's Green Lake a thousand times. The volumes were so great that new ponds sprang up in the desert. It pushed contamination deeper underground and into the groundwater years faster than it would have moved otherwise.
Along the river and in the area of the underground tanks, pump-and-treat operations are removing an assortment of radioactive and toxic pollutants. Wells draw the groundwater to the surface where it's cleaned and then injected back underground, upstream of the well.
Results have been mixed.
The technique has slowed the flow of strontium-90 to the river, but less than 1 curie of the radionuclide has been removed from the groundwater at a cost of $4 million, prompting an independent oversight group to tell the DOE in September to consider other options.
Another scientific solution has also fallen short.
Last month the final section of a chemical barrier 2,300 feet long was erected 80 to 115 feet below the surface to trap a toxic form of chromium that is trickling into the river. The pollutant is highly toxic to salmon.
The technology -- called In Situ Redox Manipulation -- traps hexavalent chromium and converts it into a less-mobile, safer form. It's supposed to be cheaper than pumping and treating, but it hasn't performed as planned.
The toxin is slipping through "holes" in the chemical net at concentrations 50 times higher than the goal.
"You've got to tweak it a little bit, but we're not giving up on ISRM," said Greg Mitchem, former manager of Bechtel's groundwater project.
The impact of chromium and other pollutants on salmon is still being debated. A 2001 study found an unusually high incidence of male DNA in the chromosomes of female Hanford Reach chinook. The abnormality could result in too many male fish compared to females.
A project to remove from the soil a potential carcinogen called carbon tetrachloride has had mixed success. In the first few years of operation, 150,000 pounds of the poison were recovered. But retrieval has been less efficient in the last three years.
DOE is working on a proposal for long-term restoration goals at the site. It restricts access to groundwater for 150 years due to contamination, upsetting some watchdog groups.
"If you restrict the groundwater, you have to restrict the shorelines of the national monument," Pollet said. "It's a cruel hoax on people who one day want to use the Hanford Reach National Monument."
DOE argues that groundwater contaminants are quickly diluted in the Columbia. The river flows at about 120,000 cubic feet per second, while the contaminated water enters at 40 cfs. Some say that natural radiation decay and the cleanup projects will protect the river, barring a serious accident.
"If we do our jobs correctly, the river should never get any worse," EPA's Faulk said.
And so the work continues and the Hanford Nuclear Reservation inches toward the finish line for cleanup. There is momentum driving the project forward, but it must be sustained, say those involved.
"Part of the difficulty with the Hanford cleanup is trying to get people to grasp the magnitude and complexity of the job at hand," said the advisory board's Martin.
"It's so hard to get people to understand that it's a long-term job and it's going to cost a lot of money, but there is an end in site."