SPOKANE, Wash. (AP) – Cleanup continues at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. The U.S. Department of Energy said Wednesday that workers have started the first large-scale treatment of an estimated 56 million gallons of radioactive waste stored in 177 underground tanks on the former nuclear weapons production site where the plutonium was made for the atomic bomb used in World War II. The cleanup of Hanford, located near Richland in southcentral Washington, comes with an estimated $300 billion to $640 billion pricetag, and will take until about 2078 to finish, according to a Department of Energy report.
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