Oregon Public Broadcasting

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is ahead of schedule on shipping weapons-grade plutonium to South Carolina.

That means the especially risky radioactive material could be off the site in Southeast Washington by June. Correspondent Anna King reports.

Hanford is home to all kinds of dangerous stuff. And one of the most radioactively hot is weapons grade plutonium. Hanford stopped producing it in 1989.

The Department of Energy has been shipping that plutonium to Savannah River in South Carolina since last fall. Now the agency is nearly half done.

Geoff Tyree is a DOE spokesman. He says storing all the plutonium waste at one facility is more efficient.

Geoff Tyree: “You want to consolidate those materials so you have them in one facility where they can be further processed if they need to be processed and also guarded in one location instead of several locations across the country.”

Once all of the weapons grade plutonium is gone from Hanford, the Energy Department will be able to start cleanup of the massive factory that produced it.

That’s a 15-acre contaminated complex with about 40 buildings left to demolish.