Hanford Site Background

The Hanford Site operated for nearly 50 years producing plutonium for national defense programs. In the late 1980s, emphasis switched to environmental cleanup and restoration of the site. In 2005, Washington Closure Hanford was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Richland Operations Office as the River Corridor Cleanup Contractor.

Washington Closure employs numerous subcontractors in its mission to safely cleanup and close the Columbia River corridor, an area of roughly 210 square miles along the outer edge of the Hanford Site that includes major portions of the Hanford Reach National Monument.

The River Corridor Cleanup Project work scope includes safely demolishing hundreds of excess facilities, cleaning up waste sites and burial grounds and placing deactivated plutonium production reactors in safe storage. The work includes efforts in Hanford’s 100 Area, where materials for nuclear reactors were created at nine plutonium production reactors; 300 Area, where uranium was fabricated and laboratory facilities reside; 400 Area, where facilities, except for the Fast Flux Test Facility, will be demolished; and 600 Area, where two complex and highly radioactive burial grounds – 618-10 and 618-11 – are located.

The Hanford Site covers 586 square miles. It is located in Benton County in southeastern Washington state and borders the Columbia River.

In 1943, under the auspices of the government’s Manhattan Project, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers began construction at Hanford on the B Reactor, the United States’ first full-scale nuclear material production reactor. Between 1943 and 1963, nine plutonium production reactors, five chemical processing plants and various support facilities were constructed and operated. The reactor facilities were located along the Columbia River. The processing plants and other facilities were located on Hanford’s central plateau. Fuel manufacturing facilities and research laboratories were located in the southeast corner of the site, near the city of Richland. Production cutbacks started in 1964 and all of Hanford’s major facilities had been closed by 1989.

Like most manufacturing processing sites, wastes were generated during operations. In the early 1940s, amidst the urgency of World War II, the government was in a desperate race to build an atomic bomb before the Germans. It would be untrue to say that waste cleanup was not a priority during those demanding times, or since. But in hindsight, it is clear that past decisions contributed to current conditions.