A Glass Nightmare: Cleaning Up the Cold War’s Nuclear Legacy at Hanford

https://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/military/a-glass-nightmare-cleaning-up-the-cold-wars-nuclear-legacy-at-hanford?utm_source=Nature+Briefing&utm_campaign=8952c41133-briefing-dy-20200428_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_c9dfd39373-8952c41133-44992633

How to clean America’s most polluted place

The Hanford Site in Washington state has been called the most polluted place in the Western Hemisphere: during the Cold War, it produced plutonium for more than 60,000 nuclear weapons. Now, engineers are struggling to clean up the radioactive mess left behind — in particular, 177 ageing tanks, inside which “watery liquids rest atop goop as thick as peanut butter and salt cakes resembling wet beach sand”. A plan to secure the waste by turning it into glass has been in the works for decades, and could end up costing as much as US$550 billion and last 60 years.

IEEE Spectrum | 18 min read