Workers move a container of treated tank waste as part of Hanford’s Test Bed Initiative to grout around 2,000 gallons of LAW for off-site disposal. (Photo: DOE)

Grouting Hanford’s low-level radioactive liquid tank waste could cost between $480 million and $1.1 billion, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office, which has repeatedly found that grouting (immobilizing waste in a concrete-like mixture) can accelerate cleanup at the Hanford Site and save billions of dollars when compared to mixing the waste with molten glass through the vitrification process.

A report by the Government Accountability Office has shown that the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management continues to face significant staffing shortages since the GAO first reported on the problem in 2024. This includes a shortage in workers considered critical to carrying out the office’s mission of cleaning up radioactive waste from decades of nuclear weapons production and research.

The noticeable exuberance within the nuclear community as a whole appears to have spilled over into the waste management sphere as well, judging from the 2026 Waste Management Conference, held March 8–12 in Phoenix, Ariz., and sponsored by Waste Management Symposia.

The theme of this year’s conference was “Efficient and Innovative Nuclear Materials and Technology Solutions,” and many of the scheduled panels and technical sessions revolved around how nuclear growth and technological advancements are affecting the back end of the fuel cycle, as well as how the cleanup of legacy sites is enabling new nuclear development.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has received concurrence from regulators that Tank 14 at the Savannah River Site has reached preliminary cease waste removal (PCWR) status after radioactive liquid waste was successfully removed from the tank. PCWR is a regulatory milestone in the closure of SRS’s old-style waste tanks, which were built in the 1950s to store waste generated by the chemical separations of plutonium and uranium.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that its Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) is setting a new benchmark in cleanup progress at the Tennessee nuclear site—conducting demolition of two former Manhattan Project–era uranium enrichment facilities in a single year.

A recent Government Accountability Office report found that the Department of Energy's Office of Environmental Management faces significant aging infrastructure, data accuracy issues, and funding challenges in managing nuclear waste cleanup facilities.

As of June 2025, DOE-EM faced more than $1.5 billion in reported repair needs across about 4,300 operating facilities at the 15 cleanup sites the office oversees, according to the report. In addition, DOE-EM’s budget request included over $950 million in maintenance spending in fiscal year 2026, an 80 percent increase since FY 2020.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management has announced that its Idaho Cleanup Project (ICP) recently received department approval for the conceptual design for a spent nuclear fuel staging facility project at Idaho National Laboratory.

The Department of Energy on April 22 issued two requests for applications seeking proposals from private industry on kickstarting the reprocessing and recycling of spent nuclear fuel in the United States.

According to the DOE, the RFAs represent an unprecedented opportunity for the private sector to restore the nation’s nuclear leadership.

Heavy metal rods are placed into large stainless steel TRIGA spent fuel canisters to test their load-bearing capabilities. (Photo: DOE)

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced last week that it is preparing to receive a shipment of spent nuclear fuel from Penn State University’s research reactor. The fuel is being shipped to Idaho National Laboratory for research purposes.

DOE-EM said crews with the Idaho Cleanup Project recently fabricated and tested four stainless steel canisters that will be used to receive and store the used TRIGA fuel. (“TRIGA” stands for “Training, Research, Isotope, General Atomics.”)

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that it has begun the permanent disposal of the first containers of vitrified low-level radioactive tank waste at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., marking a pivotal step in the nation’s radioactive tank waste cleanup mission.

A clearer definition of what constitutes high-level radioactive waste could save the Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management “tens of billions of dollars” in waste management costs and accelerate its cleanup schedule by decades, according to a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

DOE-EM’s efforts to manage waste resulting from legacy spent nuclear fuel reprocessing have been hindered for decades by the ambiguity of the statutory definition of HLW as laid out in the Atomic Energy Act and Nuclear Waste Policy Act, the report states. While admitting that the DOE has taken steps to overcome this ambiguity, the GAO says that the department has not fully evaluated all available opportunities to treat and dispose of waste more economically as either transuranic or low-level radioactive waste.

Argonne National Laboratory, located in Lemont, Ill., outside of Chicago, continues to develop a U.S. Department of Energy Packaging University Summer Institute by leveraging the laboratory’s educational resources and workforce development opportunities that support STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The institute will be open to both professionals in the nuclear packaging field and highly qualified graduate university students who are recommended by their advisors.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management faces significant cost increases, schedule delays, and data management issues in completing nuclear waste cleanup projects, according to a new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management contractor United Cleanup Oak Ridge recently expanded its partnership with the University of Tennessee to provide learning opportunities for nuclear safety specialists supporting DOE-EM’s cleanup mission.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management recently announced that, with the help of contractor Central Plateau Cleanup Company, it has completed the safe demolition of the 175-foot-tall exhaust stack of the K West reactor at the Hanford Site in Washington state.

Senators Ben Ray Luján (D., N.M.) and Tim Scott (R., S.C.) have reintroduced legislation aimed at leveraging the best available science and technology at U.S. national laboratories to support the cleanup of legacy nuclear waste.

The Combining Laboratory Expertise to Accelerate Novel Solutions for Minimizing Accumulated Radioactive Toxins (CLEAN SMART) Act, introduced on February 11, would authorize up to $58 million annually to develop, demonstrate, and deploy innovative technologies, targeting reduced costs and safer, faster remediation of sites from the Manhattan Project and Cold War.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said crews at the Hanford Site near Richland, Wash., have started retrieving radioactive waste from Tank A-106, a 1-million-gallon underground storage tank built in the 1950s.

Tank A-106 will be the 24th single-shell tank that crews have cleaned out at Hanford, which is home to 177 underground waste storage tanks: 149 single-shell tanks and 28 double-shell tanks. Ranging from 55,000 gallons to more than 1 million gallons in capacity, the tanks hold around 56 million gallons of chemical and radioactive waste resulting from plutonium production at the site.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced it had completed the largest demolition project yet at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn., when it took down the final wall of a 325,000-square-foot former uranium enrichment facility last week.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said it has transferred four robotic demolition machines from the department’s Portsmouth Site in Ohio to Oak Ridge, Tenn., saving the office more than $1.7 million by avoiding the purchase of new equipment.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management said it was insight and a questioning attitude from a project manager that led the Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) to accelerate the demolition of the Alpha-4 building at Oak Ridge’s Y-12 National Security Complex, helping avoid millions of dollars in costs to taxpayers.