Did You Know? World War II-Era Nuclear Waste Still Has No Permanent Solution

DOE denied rumors this week of a pivot at Hanford’s cleanup project. But the denial spotlights a deeper truth: World War II-era radioactive waste is still sitting in tanks, awaiting a permanent fix.

The Department of Energy has long promised a fix for the nation’s largest stockpile of nuclear waste: a plant in Washington state designed to turn it into glass. More than $30 billion has been spent on construction since it began in 2002 — and the site is still not finished. This week, after rumors surfaced that DOE might scale back or delay the project, the agency rushed to deny it. The moment has pushed a long-simmering crisis back into view:

Millions of gallons of toxic waste from World War II and the Cold War still sit in underground tanks, generations later.

What’s more, some of that radioactive waste is reportedly leaking into the soil above the Columbia River, with potentially dire environmental and public health repercussions.

The Toxic Legacy: A Nuclear Past That Still Haunts the Present

What the Hanford plant is meant to solve is staggering in scale: 56 million gallons of radioactive sludge left over from America’s atomic weapons program. Some of it dates back to World War II, when the site produced plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Much more was added during the Cold War, as the U.S. raced to build and stockpile nuclear weapons.

The waste sits in aging underground tanks, many built in the 1940s and 1950s. Eight decades on, the most toxic legacy of the nuclear age remains unresolved. They were never intended to last this long — and some are already leaking into the soil and groundwater that flows toward the Columbia River.

If escaped radionuclides reach local aquifers or the Columbia River, they could elevate long-term cancer risk (thyroid for iodine, bone for strontium-90), contaminate drinking water, and threaten communities and river life.

The Proposed Solution: DOE’s Moonshot — Turning Toxic Sludge Into Glass

Faced with this mounting threat, the Department of Energy has spent decades pursuing a single, ambitious goal: turn the waste into something stable enough to store safely for thousands of years.

The primary strategy to solve the radioactive waste issue at the Hanford Site is vitrification: take the toxic sludge, mix it with glass-forming materials, heat it to more than 2,000°F, and pour it into stainless steel canisters where it cools into solid blocks of glass. The radioactive atoms get locked inside the glass’s crystal structure, sealed away in a material stable enough to survive millennia. In theory, those glass blocks can then be buried in engineered landfills — safer, far more durable, and less likely to leach than liquid sludge sloshing in leaky tanks.

It may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but according to nuclear cleanup experts, vitrification is one of the most viable technologies available for immobilizing radioactive waste and reducing environmental risk. Meanwhile, the leaking tanks sit just a few miles from the Columbia River — a daily reminder of what’s at stake.

The $18 Billion Plant, 23 Years in the Making: Inside the Hanford Cleanup Plant

Construction on Hanford’s vitrification plant started in 2002. Twenty-three years and $18 billion later, it’s still not fully finished. The first phase — designed to process “low-activity” waste, the least radioactive portion — is scheduled to finally begin operating this fall, by mid-October, under a federal court deadline. Still, the far more radioactive high-level waste isn’t expected to be ready for vitrification until the 2030s.

In the meantime, Hanford’s 65-acre construction site has become one of the most expensive environmental projects in U.S. history, employing nearly 3,000 people and fueling an economy while the cleanup drags on. And while construction continues, the tanks remain — some already leaking — and time isn’t a luxury.

The rumor of DOE abandoning this decades-long, costly plan rattled Washington leaders and raised fears of a devastating environmental setback.

It’s one of the most expensive environmental projects in U.S. history — a price tag that adds pressure to federal energy budgets already stretched by transmission expansion, renewable incentives, and grid modernization.

Yet even if the plant works as designed, one question looms: what happens to the waste once it’s encased in glass?

The Missing Piece: A Permanent Home for Nuclear Waste

If the Hanford plant is seen through to fruition — as the Department of Energy insists it will be — the end result is glass. The toxic sludge becomes solid blocks, cooled inside stainless steel canisters and meant to last for millennia. But what happens to those blocks once they’re made?

Once vitrified, low-activity waste can be buried at Hanford in lined landfills engineered to prevent groundwater contact. The high-level waste, once processed, is supposed to be shipped someday to a permanent deep geological repository — though no alternative site has yet been established.

A national repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was studied for decades but never completed, largely because Nevadans — including state leaders — fiercely opposed becoming the nation’s dumping ground for radioactive waste. While Yucca is still officially on the books, it’s essentially politically dead, and no replacement has been designated. Other nations, like Finland, have moved forward with permanent repositories. Until both Hanford’s plant is fully operational and a national repository is established, America’s radioactive legacy remains in limbo.

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