Two deer are pictured near the D Reactor on the Hanford site. Leaders from across Washington and Oregon sent a letter to the Biden administration in early August to request… Continue Reading Washington, Oregon Read More
Artist Glenna Cole Allee stands near “White Bluffs Tapestry,” a fabric-printed photo-collage that represents the White Bluffs of Hanford Reach. (Photo courtesy Glenna Cole Allee) Listen What started as a… Continue Reading Hanford Read More
Crews have started heating up the first of two 300-ton melters inside Hanford’s Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant. (Photo courtesy Bechtel National) Listen The world’s largest melter, designed to solidify… Continue Read More
The Hanford Site sits along the Columbia River near Richland, Wash., 35 miles from the Oregon border. Listen Federal and Washington state agencies finalized an agreement last week to address… Continue Reading Legal Agreement To Address Read More
Workers walk at the end of the workday on the site of a facility being constructed to treat nuclear waste, Thursday, June 2, 2022, during a tour of the Hanford… Continue Reading Washington State And Feds Need Read More
People take boat tours throught the Columbia River during the Hanford Journey, to celebrate cleanup advocacy. Credit: Bear Sky Media. Read As the Hanford cleanup budget has been reduced in… Continue Reading Advocates Call For Read More
Reports of an active shooter in a building at the Hanford Site caused an evacuation The “all-clear” has been given at the Hanford Site after reports of an active shooter… Continue Reading All-Clear Given at Hanford Site After Report Of Active Read More
Richland high school student Augustin Dulauroy directed a film about Hanford that debuts on Amazon Prime Listen Read A Richland high schooler has been hard at work on his side-gig… Continue Reading Richland Student Directs Film Debuting On Amazon Read More
Tom Carpenter, the man who headed the Hanford Challenge, and was a thorn in the side of many politicians, is retiring from the organization. Continue Reading Tom Carpenter of Hanford Challenge RetiringRead More
Some people work their whole life trying to solve one big problem. That was the case with geoscientist John Zachara, who studied Hanford. Correspondent Anna King has this remembrance of the scientist who died recently from a rare form of blood cancer. Read More
At Hanford, a hazardous concoction of radioactive waste and chemicals sits in World War II and Cold War-era tanks. Now one of those old tanks has a serious leak. Continue Reading Hanford Tank With Radioactive Waste Has A Leak, But Read More
As President Donald Trump prepared to leave office, his Department of Energy was celebrating that a new analytical lab was “ready to operate” at the Hanford Site in southeast Washington. Continue Reading Hanford Waste Still On The Read More
David Bowen has owned his own bar in Cle Elum, been a Kittitas County commissioner and managed groundwater nitrate cleanup in the Yakima Valley. Now, he’ll hold the U.S. Department of Energy accountable for its cleanup at the site using the Tri-Party Agreement. That’s a 1989 document struck between Ecology, the federal Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Read More
By 1950, 20% of Pasco’s approximately 10,000 residents were Black, almost all living in slum conditions. Few lived in the new atomic community of Richland and none in “lily-white” Kennewick -- a fact of which Kennewick city leaders and police at the time were proud. Not only was housing segregated, but Black residents were forced to endure broad discrimination in Read More
Under the settlement, Bechtel Corp. and Aecom will pay nearly $58 million over allegations from current or former Hanford employees. The workers said they were retaliated against for blowing the whistle over how labor hours were billed. Read More
It's been 75 years since the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks to Koko Kondo, who was an infant when one of those bombs was dropped on Hiroshima. Continue Reading An Atomic Bomb Survivor On Her Journey From Read More
Denin Koch's trip to the Hanford B Reactor when he was 19 stirred his musical passion. It eventually inspired a full jazz album exploring the complicated history of Hanford, 75 years after the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan ended WWII. Read More
Hackers working with the Chinese government targeted firms developing vaccines for the coronavirus and stole hundreds of millions of dollars worth of intellectual property and trade secrets from companies across the world, the Justice Department said Tuesday as it announced criminal charges. Read More
The report from the independent Government Accountability Office says the U.S. Department of Energy has not found the root causes of the partial collapse of the waste-storage tunnel, and that failures in DOE’s investigation, inspections and maintenance of other aging and contaminated facilities is concerning. Read More
From 1949 to 1989, the massive plant’s job was to turn caustic liquids containing plutonium into solid plutonium “buttons,” as they were known. The finished buttons were about the size of hockey pucks and were used for America’s nuclear weapons. Read More
Washington Department of Ecology leaders say without access to this data, they can’t effectively protect the land, air and water for residents in eastern Washington and surrounding communities. They say they’ve attempted to negotiate this issue with federal Energy managers for years. Read More
At Hanford, in southeastern Washington, contractors have just completed much of the demo work at the site’s Plutonium Finishing Plant. But now crews have to finish the job. And that’s the tough part. Continue Reading Read More
As the country's 14th secretary of energy, Perry leads an agency he once vowed to eliminate. He has emerged as a central figure in the impeachment inquiry of Trump. Continue Reading Energy Secretary Rick Perry To Resign; Read More
The creators of a new musical work called “Nuclear Dreams” highlight the dreams and nightmares of people who work and live near Hanford in Washington’s Tri-Cities. Continue Reading Oratorio Performed Inside Read More
An astonishing array of animals and habitats flourished on six obsolete weapons complexes — mostly for nuclear or chemical arms — because the sites banned the public and other intrusions for decades. Continue Reading Wildlife Read More
A wildfire continued burning today near the Hanford Nuclear Site. The Cold Creek Fire is burning sensitive, federally protected habitat. As of Friday afternoon it was estimated at about 18,000 acres and 10 percent containment. Read More
A new federal report says that a massive building at the Hanford Nuclear Site is worse off than managers thought. The so-called PUREX -- Plutonium Uranium Extraction -- plant isn’t clean. Starting in 1956 the plant processed loads of plutonium. Its walls are up to 6 feet thick, and it’s as long as three football fields. Read More
The state of Washington is setting new deadlines for cleanup at Hanford and the plutonium production site that contains a massive quantity of radioactive waste. Continue Reading Washington State Sets New Deadlines For Hanford Waste CleanupRead More
At the Hanford Nuclear Site in southeastern Washington, and across the West, winter’s deep snow and a cool spring have produced lots of brush and grass. That’s a problem for the coming fire season. Continue Reading Big Spring Read More
A worker at the Hanford Nuclear Site was recently contaminated with a speck of radioactive material after work in a lab building scheduled for demolition. Continue Reading Worker At Hanford Contaminated In Lab Scheduled For DemolitionRead More
Federal watchdogs are looking into all types of parts at a $17 billion construction project at the Hanford Nuclear Site. The Inspector General for the U.S. Department of Energy has found a sample of parts going into a large waste treatment plant at Hanford had problems. Read More
As nuclear and radioactive waste piles up, private companies are stepping in with their own solutions for the nation’s radioactive spent fuel. One is proposing a temporary storage site in New Mexico, and another is seeking a license for a site in Texas. But most experts agree that what’s needed is a permanent site, like Yucca Mountain, that doesn’t require humans to manage Read More
The project to stabilize and seal a large tunnel of radioactive waste has been completed at the Hanford nuclear reservation, according to the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractor. The so-called Tunnel 2 project started in October 2018, at the massive Washington cleanup site near Richland. Read More
On April 1, scientists will officially restart their search for gravitational waves after a year spent making improvements to massive twin detectors. Discoveries should soon start rolling in, and when they do, there's a good chance the news will be translated into a Native American language called Blackfoot, or Siksika. Read More
PHOTO: Anna King interviewing Jane Hedges, the now-retired head of Washington Ecology’s Hanford office. Hedges grew up swimming off the docks in Richland, but only understood the massive scope of the… Continue Read More
The federal government recently doled out two “green findings” to the Northwest’s only commercial nuclear reactor. The Columbia Generating Station, near Richland, is run by the utility Energy Northwest. Green findings are the lowest infractions for the nuclear industry, but it’s not the only time the plant’s been in trouble. Read More
A new proposal from the Trump administration could dramatically change the way the government cleans up radioactive tank waste at Hanford. What does that mean? Anna King explains. Continue Reading Explainer: Feds Want To Read More
The partial government shutdown is blocking some of important oversight at Hanford. In the past 10 years, the Environmental Protection Agency office in Richland has shrunk from nearly 10 experts working on Hanford issues to just three – including the top manager. Read More
In the middle of Hanford's desert, there’s a tunnel that stretches a third of a mile underground. Anna King got a first-of-its kind look at how work is progressing to prevent another collapse at one of the tunnels willed with radioactive waste. Read More
A fresh federal watchdog report about Hanford says after a major review, systemic fraud and inadequate oversight keep happening at the site, and it’s costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Continue Reading Read More
Many people drove as much as three hours to attend a rare public meeting about Hanford in Hood River Thursday night, Nov. 1. The common thread: concern about the Columbia River, and the health of their communities. Continue Read More
Officials at the Hanford Nuclear Site ordered workers to stay indoors Friday morning as a precaution. They discovered steam rising from an unexpected part of a tunnel filled with highly contaminated waste. By mid-day, officials had announced they found no contamination. Read More
Federal and state energy regulators will hold back-to-back meetings in Portland and Seattle for a proposal to reclassify some of the high-level nuclear waste at the Hanford Nuclear Site. Continue Reading State And Federal Regulators Read More
Keeping the Columbia River safe is at the core of several public meetings scheduled for Seattle and Portland next week. It all has to do with decisions being made hundreds of miles away in the desert at Hanford. The question regulators are tacking: How do you keep a mostly-empty radioactive waste tank safe for hundreds, thousands even a million years? Read More
Work began this week to fill a roughly 1.3-mile-long tunnel with grout at the Hanford Nuclear Site. The tunnel is filled with highly hazardous radioactive waste. Continue Reading Works Starts On Read More
Another large tunnel of radioactive waste will be grouted closed at Hanford. That was the decision Friday by the Washington Department of Ecology. The long process goes back to when another tunnel, simply called Tunnel 1, partially collapsed in May 2017. Read More
Last week, the state of Washington, a Hanford union and a Hanford watchdog organization said they have tentatively settled a three-year old lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Energy over workers being made sick from toxic vapors from Hanford’s underground tanks. Read More
The state of Washington has been after the federal government to keep Hanford cleanup workers from getting sick. On Wednesday, Sept. 19, they filed an agreement in federal court. Continue Reading Feds And Washington State Sign Fresh Read More
The Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge sits on more than 5,000 acres of trees, wetlands and pristine rolling prairie about 16 miles northwest of Denver. It hosts 239 migratory and resident species, from falcons and elk to the threatened Preble's meadow jumping mouse. It also used to be the site of a federal nuclear weapons facility — and it's reopening to the public this Read More
Since the late 1980s, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has been keeping track of big polluters through their Toxic Waste Inventory or TRI. The EPA has released their latest data for 2017. We crunched some numbers for Washington, and here are the results. Read More
