An international team of researchers have collaborated to reduce operational risk and realize a vision of long-term success for the Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP) at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site near Richland, Wash.
Above: WTP workers add glass beads, called “frit,” to the melter inside the plant’s Low-Activity Waste Facility. (Photo: Bechtel National Inc.)
For over a decade, the DOE’s Hanford Field Office (HFO) has been working with national laboratories, universities, and glass industry experts to establish capabilities and generate data to increase the confidence in a successful startup and transition to full-time operations at the WTP.
OREM team members with the transport cask used to ship the legacy waste out of state for permanent disposal. (Photo: DOE)
Oak Ridge National Laboratory has successfully removed legacy radioactive waste stored for more than five decades, marking a significant cleanup milestone. The Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management (OREM) and cleanup contractor UCOR processed and shipped highly radioactive source material, including radium-226 and boron, out of state for permanent disposal.
Hanford crews break up concrete and remove contaminated soil near the site’s former K Area reactors in 2023. (Photo: DOE)
The cost to complete the cleanup of the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state could cost as much as $589.4 billion, according to the 2025 Hanford Lifecycle Scope, Schedule, and Cost Report, which was released by the DOE on April 15. While that estimate is $44.2 billion lower than the DOE’s 2022 estimate of $640.6 billion, a separate, low-end estimate has since grown by more than 21 percent, to $364 billion.
The life cycle report, which the DOE is legally required to issue every three years under agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Washington State Department of Ecology (Ecology), summarizes the remaining work scope, schedule, and cost estimates for the nuclear site. For more than 40 years, Hanford’s reactors produced plutonium for America’s defense program.
A worker replaces the end jig used to collect fuel debris samples from the damaged Fukushima reactor. (Photo: TEPCO)
Tokyo Electric Power Company is scheduled this week to begin retrieving a second sample of nuclear fuel debris from Unit 2 of Japan’s damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. This second retrieval comes after TEPCO improved the telescopic device used to gather samples.
The Savannah River Site’s HB Line facility is located on top of the H Canyon chemical separations facility. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy has announced that workers at its Savannah River Site in South Carolina recently removed legacy uranium materials from the site’s HB Line as part of an effort to clear the facility of its inventory of legacy nuclear materials. The removed legacy uranium was originally produced by the Y-12 National Security Complex at Oak Ridge, Tenn.
Deep Isolation’s Rod Baltzer and Deep Fission’s Elizabeth Muller. (Photo: Deep Fission)
Nuclear start-ups Deep Fission and Deep Isolation will collaborate on the management of spent nuclear fuel from Deep Fission’s advanced underground reactors under a memorandum of understanding signed by the companies.
SRNL senior scientist Travis Deason demonstrates for lab fellow David Diprete the search for appropriate crystals of novel actinide materials using a microscope located in a radiological containment unit. (Photo: SRNS/Lj Gay)
Savannah River National Laboratory researchers are building on the laboratory’s legacy of using cutting-edge science to effectively immobilize nuclear waste in innovative ways. As part of the Center for Hierarchical Waste Form Materials, SRNL is leveraging its depth of experience in radiological waste management to explore new frontiers in the industry.
Researchers at the University of Sheffield are exploring new cement technologies to safely encapsulate nuclear waste. (Photo: University of Sheffield)
The University of Sheffield announced that it has engaged in a new £1 million (about $1.29 million) research partnership with Sellafield Ltd., the U.K. Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, and the U.K. National Nuclear Laboratory that will seek to address some of the challenges of nuclear waste encapsulation by looking at new cement technologies to provide safe and reliable disposal solutions.
The KIF document is meant to engage the reader to share, imagine, and renew nuclear waste information. (Photo: Per Wistbo Nibell)
The preservation of records, knowledge, and memory is recognized as an important component of nuclear waste management, preventing future generations from unnecessary interference with a waste repository and supporting future societies to make informed decisions about such sites.
HEPA filters located within the Safety Significant Confinement Ventilation System facility at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. (Photo: DOE)
The Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management announced that it has completed the commissioning of a new, nearly $500 million, large-scale ventilation system at its Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the DOE’s geologic repository for defense-related transuranic waste in New Mexico.
The U.S. Supreme Court. Front row, from left: Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., and Associate Justice Elena Kagan. Back row, from left: Associate Justice Amy Coney Barrett, Associate Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, Associate Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. (Photo: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States)
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s licensing of Interim Storage Partners’ consolidated interim storage facility in Andrews County, Texas. Both the NRC and ISP petitioned the Supreme Court to review a decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals that invalidated the NRC-granted license for the facility. Those two cases were consolidated into one, NRC v. Texas, which was heard by the court.
Concept art of Moltex’s SSR–W and WATSS facility. (Image: Moltex)
Advanced reactor company Moltex Energy Canada said it has successfully validated its waste to stable salt (WATSS) process on used nuclear fuel bundles from an unnamed Canadian commercial reactor through hot cell experiments conducted by Canadian Nuclear Laboratories.
Aggregate is delivered by rail to the U.K.’s Low-Level Waste Repository site. (Photo: NWS)
Nuclear Waste Services (NWS), which manages the disposal of the United Kingdom’s low-level radioactive waste, announced this week that a major milestone has been reached at its Low Level Waste Repository in West Cumbria, England, as work begins on the final capping of legacy disposal trenches and vaults at the site.
The Oyster Creek ISFSI. (Photo: Holtec International)
The Tax Court of New Jersey has ruled that Oyster Creek’s spent nuclear fuel storage casks are subject to taxation as real property.
The IAEA’s Rafael Mariano Grossi (far right) and other IAEA experts joined scientists from China, South Korea, and Switzerland as they collected seawater samples near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. (Photo: Dean Calma/IAEA)
International Atomic Energy Agency director general Rafael Mariano Grossi visited Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi site on February 19, where he joined scientists from the Third Institute of Oceanography in China, the Korean Institute for Nuclear Safety in South Korea, and the Spiez Laboratory in Switzerland in collecting seawater samples from a boat near the damaged nuclear power plant.
Idaho Cleanup Project crews with the Calcine Disposition Project watch as robotics equipment is tested remotely inside a full-scale replica of a calcine bin set. (Photo: DOE)
A team with the Department of Energy’s Idaho Cleanup Project successfully tested robotic equipment being developed to retrieve radioactive calcine, a granular solid waste, at the Idaho National Laboratory Site, the DOE’s Office of Environmental Management has announced.
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