Oregon Public Broadcasting

At the Hanford Reservation in south-central Washington, 53-million gallons of radioactive waste sits in underground tanks. That's enough to fill 80 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

The government's been trying to clean up that mess, but it's slow going. This year, President Obama's federal stimulus package includes $2 billion to speed up the pace of cleanup at Hanford. But getting rid of nuclear waste is incredibly complicated.

Richland Correspondent Anna King uses a series of food analogies to examine the complexities of just one of those tanks of waste: It's called C-110.

Hanford workers struggle to empty waste from tank C-110. There are 177 tanks full of radioactive sludge at the nuclear site in southcentral Washington. Photo courtesy of Washington River Protection Solutions.

Hanford's tank C-110 is buried underneath what looks like a gravel parking lot. Tubes, monitoring equipment and venting pipes jut out of the ground. It's eerie here.

Tank C-110 is like a jar of old-fashioned peanut butter that's been sitting in the back of the pantry for too long. It's a layered, sticky mess for the government to clean up. But hold up. To understand how it got that way, first a little history.

During WWII and the Cold War the government built 177 underground tanks at Hanford. The tanks hold all the gunk that was left over from producing plutonium for atomic bombs.

So what's the recipe inside C-110?

178,000 gallons of radioactive caustic chemicals. The underground stew in this and other tanks, has become notorious for belching fumes and making Hanford workers sick. Some of the stuff in C-110 has a 200,000-year half life.

Steve Pfaff: "You look back at that point in time and you wonder, you know what were you thinking? And you had people, just like today, doing the best they can with what they had."

Steve Pfaff is in charge of managing about 53 million gallons of tank waste for the federal Department of Energy. He remains optimistic that the many problems with cleaning up tank waste can be solved.

That's Steve Pfaff. He's the government manager with the seemingly impossible job of emptying these tanks.

Pfaff's main problem -- Some of these steel-lined concrete tanks were only meant to last until the end of the WWII. The government figured it would have a solution by then.

Now, about 60 years later, the waste inside C-110 and others is still stewing. Even worse, about 70 containers have leaked a million gallons of waste into the ground.

Here's Tom Carpenter. He runs Hanford Challenge, a watchdog group out of Seattle. He says some of that waste will eventually reach the Columbia River.

Tom Carpenter: "Some of it is getting into the groundwater for sure. It's been measured in the ground water. How that will impact the river down the road is anybody's guess, no one really seems to know that."

Right now the government is focused on removing the waste from suspect tanks and putting it into other, more-stable ones. Long-term the plan is to bake the sludgy waste into glass logs in a massive factory. But the $12-billion plant won't start up for another 10 years.

OK, back to the old peanut butter. C-110 tank waste has a liquid layer on top, a sludgy layer in the middle and a hard-as-concrete layer on the bottom. Different consistencies, but pretty much the same stuff.

Other tanks are like a really wicked 9-layer Mexican chip dip. Each stripe of beans, guacamole and sour cream is a different layer of chemicals with varying degrees of radioactivity.

Nancy Uziemblo is the State of Washington's watchdog on the tanks. She says government contractors have to use little robots, pressure sprayers and high-tech vacuum tubes to get up the most compacted waste. The hardest part comes when they reach near the bottom.

C-Farm is where tank C-110 lays underground sleeping. Work on the tank has halted for now until the government can figure out what to do next. There's still about 10 percent of the radioactive waste left in the tank.

Nancy Uziemblo: "My analogy is a milkshake. When you have a milkshake and you want to get all of the milkshake out of the cup, it's easy to slurp out the first part. That goes well, it goes well through the straw, but when you are down to the bottom, and it's sitting at the bottom, it's not as easy and it takes a little longer."

On tank C-110, workers have reached the bottom. Only 10 percent of the waste remains. When they get to 1 percent the state checks it off the cleanup list. But work on C-110 is on hold until the government can figure out how to get to that point.

To start work on other tanks, the government and its contractors are now working on a new massive robotic arm that might clean out waste faster. Think of it as a mix-master with different attachments.

But here's where all the food analogies break down. We know the ingredients peanut butter and Mexican chip dip, but scientists don't know what all those tank layers are.

To pump the slurry of waste to the factory, treat it and bake up good glass logs, they need to know what's in it.  Teams of scientists work in a super-secure hot-cell lab at Hanford to figure out what's in the goo.

Robert Schroeder: "We are now entering, a rad material, rad buffer area."

Past the air lock the hot-cell lab manager, Robert Schroeder, takes me to look at some of the waste from C-110.

Anna King: "So what we are looking at is about four containers like jelly jars, with plastic blue tops on them. And they are just kind of filled up, and it looks like Mountain Dew."

Even though it looks tame, the waste from tank C-110 is so crazy bad the window protecting me from the radiation is a more than a foot thick.

On the long car ride home off the Hanford site, I ask Steve Pfaff some big questions that remain about tank waste.

How will the government pump the sludge from the tanks to the massive factory where it will be treated and then baked into glass? Some of the tanks are miles away.

Where will all that glass end up anyway?

And finally, will Hanford managers be able to empty the tanks fast enough to feed the treatment plant? So far federal contractors have only emptied six tanks in as many years. At that rate it would take another 170 years for all the tanks to be cleaned out.

Hanford's like an outrageously messy, after-party kitchen to clean up, but Pfaff says he's still optimistic.

Steve Pfaff: "We have the ability to get it done in a reasonable amount of time. It's never as fast as we would like. But I think we are applying good effort, good people toward it."

Despite so much hard work, it's just that the problems are so many, and so big.