Oregon Public Broadcasting

Just paces away from the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River sits an infamous holding tank.

The giant underground pool at the Hanford Nuclear reservation was filled with radioactive fuel rods, sludge and garbage shielded by water. But millions of gallons of that radioactive stew leaked.

So now, workers have emptied the pool of its dangerous contents.  And they've started to dismantle the structures surrounding it. Correspondent Anna King visited the site to check up on the demolition project.

Standing nearby is Dave Brockman. He’s head of the Department of Energy at Hanford. He’s a towering man. His hands are so large you can hardly see yours when you shake.

He’s less concerned about the K-East Basin itself. What he’s most worried about is what’s leaked and what lurks underneath the giant concrete pool.

Dave Brockman: "We don’t know how bad it is under there. You can’t obviously bore down through the floor when there was water in it. It leaked out through small cracks and small things. We think there will be quite a bit of contaminated soil, but the bottom line is let’s get down there and figure out what we have."

Brockman wants to get at that soil before more radioactive waste reaches the Columbia River. After all the buildings are taken care of, the trackhoes will turn their attention to the pool itself.

Then scientists can study the best way to take care of the contaminated soil.

Nick Ceto runs the Environmental Protection Agency office that oversees Hanford. He says tearing out K-East is wonderful. But he’s still going to push federal officials to keep up the pace of cleanup near the Columbia River.

Nick Ceto: "All of us that live in this community and that are trying to get Hanford cleanup done would really like to see this river corridor work finished by 2015."

That means cleaning up another large concrete pool full of radioactive sludge and pieces of fuel rods. That one’s just a quarter mile away and called the K-West Basin. It isn’t leaking so far.

Both the K-East and K-West basins were used to store uranium fuel rods that came out of Hanford’s reactors.