SEATTLE — For much of the 20th century, a sprawling complex in the desert of southeastern Washington turned out most of the plutonium used in the nation’s nuclear arsenal, from the first atomic bomb to the arms race that fueled the Cold War.

Now, after decades of planning and billions of dollars of investment, liquid nuclear and chemical waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is being turned into a much safer substance: glass.

State regulators on Wednesday issued the final permit needed for workers to remove more waste from often-leaky underground tanks, mix it in a crucible with additives, and heat it above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The mixture then cools in stainless steel vats and solidifies as glass — still radioactive, but far more stable in storage, and less likely to seep into the soil or the Columbia River nearby.

The long-awaited development is a key step in cleaning up the nation’s most polluted nuclear waste site. Construction of the Hanford Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant began in 2002.

“We are at the precipice of a really significant moment in Hanford’s history,” Casey Sixkiller, director of the Washington State Department of Ecology, said in a video interview.

The roughly 600-square-mile reservation is near the confluence of two of the Pacific Northwest’s most significant rivers, the Columbia and the Snake, in an area important to Native American tribes for millennia.

Wartime planners selected the area because it was isolated and had access to cold water and hydroelectric power. In early 1943, the U.S. government seized the land for a secret project, displacing roughly 2,000 residents, including farmers.

Tens of thousands of workers then responded to newspaper ads around the country promising good jobs to support the Allied effort to defeat Nazi Germany and Japan in World War II, and a new company town arose in the desert.

Most of the workers had no idea they were involved in building the world’s first full-scale plutonium production reactor until the U.S. dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, and President Harry S. Truman announced to the world the existence of the Manhattan Project.

Hanford would grow to include nine nuclear reactors churning out plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal. The last of these was shut down in 1987. Two years later, Washington state, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reached an agreement for site cleanup.

Seven of the nine reactors have been “cocooned” to prevent contamination from escaping until radiation levels drop enough to allow for the structures to be dismantled, near the end of this century.

There are also 177 giant underground tanks that hold some 56 million gallons of highly radioactive and chemically hazardous waste. Those tanks are well past their projected lifespan of 25 years. More than one-third have leaked in the past, and three are currently leaking.

During Hanford’s years producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, effluent was dumped directly into the Columbia River and into ineffective containment ponds, polluting the surrounding groundwater and contaminating the food chain of wildlife that depends on it, according to a 2013 government assessment.

Now Hanford is focused on cleanup, with an annual budget of around $3 billion.

Encasing radioactive waste in glass — called “vitrification” — has been recognized since at least the 1980s as an effective method for neutralizing it. There are plans for two facilities at Hanford: the one now approved to process low-level nuclear waste, and an adjacent facility (now under construction) to handle high-level waste.

More than $30 billion has been spent on the plants so far. The U.S. Department of Energy, which oversees Hanford, faced an Oct. 15 deadline to convert some of its stored waste into glass, per a cleanup schedule and consent decree involving the EPA and Washington state.

The first waste to be mixed with glass will include pretreated radioactive cesium and strontium, according to a Department of Energy statement.

The department fired Roger Jarrell, its main overseer of the Hanford cleanup, earlier this month, prompting concerns about the Trump administration’s commitment. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Washington, said Energy Secretary Chris Wright told her by phone that he was looking to stall the vitrification operations.

That prompted outrage from Washington state officials. Gov. Bob Ferguson, joined at a news conference by tribal leaders and labor representatives, threatened legal action.

But Wright insisted the department had changed nothing, and on Sept. 17, a deputy signed paperwork allowing vitrification to proceed following approvals by state regulators.

“Although there are challenges, we are committed to beginning operations by October 15, 2025,” Wright stated last month. “As always, we are prioritizing the health and safety of both the workforce and the community as we work to meet our nation’s need to safely and efficiently dispose of nuclear waste.”

On Wednesday, with state approval issued, Ferguson urged the Energy Department to follow through.

“Our state has done our part to start up the Waste Treatment Plant,” Ferguson stated. “Now the federal government needs to live up to its responsibilities and clean up what they left behind.”

In a statement issued ahead of the government shutdown, the Department of Energy said it would be able to continue all its operations for one to five days. After that, the department’s work will cease unless operations are “related to the safety of human life and the protection of property.”

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Oregon State University and its Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center recently announced submission to the federal government of a plan outlining construction and operation of a wave energy test site off of the Oregon coastline.

The facility would be built seven miles west of Seal Rock in Lincoln County, and when complete it would be the first full-scale wave energy test site in the U.S. connected to the electrical grid.

OSU‘s 1,000-page test site plan details not only how the wave energy site would be built and run, but also measures that would be taken to minimize potential environmental impacts to local marine fisheries and other resources. The plan is part of the university’s draft license application to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an independent agency that regulates electricity transmission.

Work that went into creating the project plan was paid for largely with dollars from a $35 million U.S. Department of Energy grant received by the university in December 2016. The state of Oregon also is backing the project.

Wave energy converters are among the devices the Energy Department is researching to generate energy from the ocean. Other examples include tidal and current energy converters as well as ocean thermal energy conversion technologies. These devices are collectively referred to as MHK technologies.

If the university’s application is successful and the wave energy test site becomes operational, likely sometime in 2021, it is designed to have a maximum output of 20 megawatts of electricity under optimal conditions. That is enough power for roughly 20,000 homes.

Burke Hales is an Oregon State University professor and the chief scientist for the wave energy project, which began more than five years ago with the work of a Newport-area site selection team. Despite the relatively mature technology at the heart of wave energy, construction of such facilities for permanent use has, to date, been cost-prohibitive, he said.

“That’s the big issue – money, money, money,” Hales said.

Since those early days, OSU has gone through the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s alternative licensing process, which requires collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders.

Hales said the test site would be a proving ground for companies involved in manufacturing wave energy conversion devices. Currently, several are available in the marketplace.

Industry sources show these devices range in design from point absorbers, which capture wave motion, to attenuators, which resemble articulated snakes and are designed to respond to wave curvature. There also are devices that are open to the ocean on the bottom and use oscillating water columns to drive a turbine and generate power, and there are hybrid devices using one or more of these techniques.

“It will allow the developers to come to us to test their devices in a full electrical grid state,” Hales said. “We’re building the infrastructure that allows the people who build the energy devices to connect to the grid. Regardless of how the developers choose to produce wave energy, it doesn’t matter; we’re just providing the infrastructure.”

According to Department of Energy documentation, the test site would be six nautical miles west of Seal Rock in Lincoln County in waters ranging from 213 to 256 feet deep. It would be around two square nautical miles in surface area.

When finished, the site would hold four test berths, each capable of operating either an individual device or an array of devices – up to 20.

Power generated at the site would be transmitted to facilities onshore via four undersea cables that would be buried and run through conduits. Expectations are that the site would have a 25-year life span.

As for construction, Hales said it would actually be fairly simple.

A set of commercial buildings would be built onshore at the point where undersea electric cables connect to the wave energy devices at the shoreline.

Then there is the seabed excavation and boring required to emplace the electric cables beneath the sea floor. Only a handful of contractors across the globe carry out this type of heavy work, Hales said.

OSU is working with 3U Technologies, a Texas-based firm offering design and engineering in many areas, including submarine cables, to find a contractor for the project. As part of its support, the company is providing transmission cable design, delivery and installation planning, as well as cable route selection.

The company did not return calls seeking comment.

The total cost of construction would likely be around $15 million, Hales said.

“It’s actually really simple,” he said. “There (would be) sea cables that are buried in the sea floor. They (would) run about 20 kilometers into a set of buried splice vaults, which are like giant underground manholes.”

There, the four-inch-thick cables would feed up to 36,000 volts of raw power from the wave energy devices into the terrestrial conversion facility so it could be directed into the wider electric grid.

“We take what are likely to be complicated and diverse types of energy in terms of voltage, frequency and power,” Hales said, “and we convert that to a form that is compatible with the grid.”

OSU already has extensive experience in similar projects, having installed a series of undersea cables connecting ocean-based observation platforms with facilities onshore.

“People have been laying big undersea cables across the Oregon shelf for decades,” he said.

Two years’ worth of environmental studies have been carried out to date. Project managers like Hales now believe the wave energy concept can be carried out safely with little adverse effect on the marine ecosystem, including the potential impact of noise on marine wildlife.

“We’re taking a lot of those things into consideration,” Hales said. “But once the cable is in there, once it’s buried on the sea floor, there isn’t that much of an impact. So it’s really a matter of how much disruption will the construction cause? We think it’s pretty minor.”

At this point, FERC regulations require a 90-day period to allow submission of public comments. OSU will then be in position to submit a final application, likely late this year. If approval were given, university officials expect construction of the test site infrastructure would begin in fall 2019, Hales said.

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