In the desert 350 km east of Seattle, Wash., more than 200,000 cubic meters of dangerous high-level radioactive waste wait in 177 tanks, many of them decrepit and leaking. A legacy of half a century of nuclear weapons production, the waste has so far defied a full decade of attempts to stabilize it and dispose of it.
To date, the U.S. Department of Energy, which is responsible for the waste, has spent $5 billion on these unsuccessful efforts. It now expects to spend $1 billion a year for the next 40 years on the project. But the need for more progress in dealing with this intensely radioactive waste is not just financial: the DOE estimates that at least 3800 cubic meters of the waste have already leaked into the soil, just 10 kilometers from the vitally important Columbia River. Lacking effective action, more waste can be expected to leach from the decaying steel tanks, each of which is roughly the size of the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol Building.
In this article in IEEE Spectrum, the two senior analysts studying the complex Hanford problem for the U.S. Congress report on the reasons why so little progress is evident at the site. They also offer a prescription for future progress.
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