There was “no turning back,” said one media report last October, for the public-private cleanup team on the U.S. Energy Dept.’s Hanford nuclear waste site’s epic vitrification plant project when the world’s largest melter—one of two 300-ton installed machines set to use 2,100° F of heat to convert waste into inert glass—was turned on for the first time.
It was a milestone for the 20-plus-year effort by Bechtel National Inc. as design, construction and commissioning contractor for the first industrial-scale process to dispose of 56 million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste dating to World War II stored at the one-time nuclear bombmaking complex in Washington state.