Workers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state have finished excavating a new landfill disposal cell, which should lengthen the lifespan of the radwaste facility by 15 years.
DOE’s Office of Environmental Management announced just before Christmas that workers for contractor Central Plateau Cleanup Company have finished digging out Super Cell 11 at Hanford’s Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility.
Once an engineered line is added in the spring of 2026, the new Super Cell, 500 feet wide by 1,000 feet long, should add about 2.8 million cubic yards of disposal capacity to the landfill, the nuclear cleanup office said in a Dec. 23 press release.
The Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility located in the middle of the former plutonium production complex property, has taken in nearly 20 million tons of low-level radioactive and hazardous chemical waste from Hanford cleanup since 1996, according to the news release. The recent expansion should provide the landfill with enough additional disposal space through 2040.