The US buried millions of gallons of wartime nuclear waste - Doge cuts could wreck the cleanup [View all]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/15/us-government-nuclear-waste-doge

The US buried millions of gallons of wartime nuclear waste – Doge cuts could wreck the cleanup

Hanford made the plutonium for US atomic bombs, and its radioactive waste must be dealt with. Enter Elon Musk

Andrew Buncombe in Richland, Washington
Thu 15 May 2025 09.00 EDT

In the bustling rural city of Richland, in south-eastern Washington, the signs of a nuclear past are all around.

A small museum explains its role in the Manhattan Project and its “singular mission – [to] develop the world’s first atomic bomb before the enemy might do the same”. The city’s high school sports team is still known as the Bombers, with a logo that consists of the letter R set with a mushroom cloud.

Richland lies just 30 miles from the Hanford nuclear site, a sprawling plant that produced the plutonium for America’s atomic weapons during the second world war – and later the bomb dropped over Nagasaki. Over the decades, thousands of people in the Tri-Cities area of southern Washington worked at the plant, which shuttered in 1989.

But a dark legacy of Hanford still lingers here: vast amounts of highly radioactive waste nobody is quite sure what to do with.

Residents have long spearheaded an operation to deal with 56m gallons of nuclear waste left behind in dozens of underground tanks – a cleanup that is expected to cost half a trillion dollars and may not be completed until 2100. The government has called it “one of the largest and most expensive environmental cleanup projects worldwide”.

In recent weeks, what has already been a costly and painstakingly slow process has come under renewed scrutiny, following an exodus of experts from the Department of Energy (DoE) that is overseeing the cleanup being executed by thousands of contract workers.

According to local media, several dozen staff, who reportedly include managers, scientists and safety experts, have taken early retirement or been fired as part of a broader government reduction overseen by Elon Musk and his “department of government efficiency”. The government has refused to provide a specific figure for how many people involved with cleanup efforts have left. The top DoE manager at the Hanford site, Brian Vance, who had many years of experience, resigned at the end of March without giving a reason.

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