HANFORD 200 AREA DOE

Ecology and US Environmental Protection Agency are working with US Department of Energy to clean up Hanford 200 Area National Priorities List (NPL) Site, located in the Central Plateau of the Hanford Site, Benton County.

The 200 Area comprises the 200 East and West Areas and a smaller 200 North Area, all located on the Central Plateau. The 200 Area covers approximately 75 square miles (194 square kilometers), containing numerous waste sites, contaminated facilities, and groundwater contamination plumes.

The Central Plateau's 200 Areas were used primarily for waste management activities and reprocessing spent nuclear fuel to recover special nuclear materials for use in national defense. Approximately 1,000 facilities, structures, and buildings, including the Plutonium Finishing Plant (PFP) and five large chemical processing or 'canyon' facilities (T Plant, B Plant, U Plant, REDOX Plant, and the Plutonium/Uranium Extraction (PUREX) Plant) were built to support processing irradiated fuel from the plutonium production reactors and for waste TSD. These processing activities generated large volumes of radioactive, hazardous, and mixed waste that either were disposed of to the soil column as liquid effluent via engineered structures such as cribs and trenches, or went into the soil column as spills and leaks. The liquid effluents were transported to the disposal waste sites or tank farms via single- and double-wall pipelines. The processing activities also generated solid waste that was disposed of in landfills. The intentional disposal and inadvertent release of this waste created more than 800 waste sites in the Central Plateau.

See our Hanford cleanup webpage for information.