Plan to Leave Buried Nuclear Bomb Waste Underground Draws Fire
- Radioactive bomb leftovers could remain near Columbia River
- Energy Department proposal would reclassify waste at Hanford
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After spending billions of dollars over several decades to remove radioactive waste leaking from a plant where nuclear bombs were made, the U.S. Department of Energy has come up with a new plan: leave it in the ground.
The shuttered Hanford Nuclear Reservation, which produced plutonium for U.S. atomic weapons from World War II through the Cold War, is the nation’s largest nuclear cleanup site with about 56 million gallons of waste stored in leak-prone underground tanks in south-central Washington State.