Polluted weapons factory begins locking up nuclear waste in glass
After years of delay and political wrangling, DOE’s Hanford site opens vitrification plant
15 Oct 2025
Work to clean up long-lived radioactive waste at one of the world’s most polluted places took a big step forward this week, when a facility at a former nuclear weapons site in eastern Washington state began to entomb radioactive waste in glass.
The landmark move at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Hanford Site comes nearly 2 decades later than first promised because of technical problems, cost overruns, and missed deadlines. Federal and state officials hailed the event as a milestone. “We’ve still got a ways to go before we’re anywhere near done, but today’s success is worth celebrating—let’s make glass!” U.S. Senator Patty Murray (D—WA) said in a statement issued shortly after the DOE announcement.
There was also a sigh of relief from those who had feared federal officials might be planning a last-minute retreat from the technique known as vitrification, in which waste is mixed with molten silicate and other materials to create inert glass logs. The acting head of DOE’s environmental program was fired in early September, prompting speculation the agency was trying to shift toward storing the waste by mixing it with a cementlike substance called grout. That approach was championed as quicker and cheaper by the conservative Heritage Foundation in its influential Project 2025 report. But Washington state officials warned such a move would break a legal agreement to begin vitrifying waste by 15 October.
The new development meets the legal deadline to demonstrate that the plant can successfully process waste, Hanford Site Manager Ray Geimer said in a statement. The factory, which has already cost more than $10 billion to build, is part of a broader cleanup project expected to take another $200 billion to $350 billion to complete.
The goal is to find a permanent solution for 325 million liters of liquid waste left from the manufacturing of plutonium pits for nuclear weapons from World War II until the end of the Cold War era in 1989. Most of the waste is stored in 177 massive carbon steel tanks. Some of the tanks have corroded and leaked waste into the soil not far from the Columbia River, the largest river on the West Coast.
Over the past week, plant operators filled four stainless steel cylinders with waste-impregnated glass, each containing nearly 5500 liters of waste, according to a spokesperson for Bechtel, the private company hired by DOE to build the plant. In the next 40 years, the facility is supposed to process approximately 90% of the total waste, a mixture of acids, water, salts, and trace amounts of radioactive elements including technetium and iodine.
But that doesn’t cover some of the trickiest waste—a peanut butter–like sludge congealed at the bottoms of the tanks. Work on a separate vitrification plant to deal with that waste was halted in 2012. Only recently has DOE restarted design and engineering work on that facility. If it stays on schedule, it’s expected to begin treating waste in the 2030s, and continue running into the 2070s.
Source: SCIENCE
