At the centre of Washington state’s sprawling Hanford Site, an enormous engineered landfill is being made larger as one of the United States’ biggest environmental cleanup programmes continues. According to the US Department of Energy (DOE), the Environmental Restoration Disposal Facility (ERDF) has been receiving waste since 1996. Over that time, 20 million tons of material from cleanup operations have been placed there, including low-level radioactive and hazardous waste. Now, workers have finished excavating another section of the landfill. The new disposal cell is 80 feet deep and covers an area roughly 500 feet wide and 1,000 feet long. Once its protective liner is installed, it will provide another 2.8 million cubic yards of capacity. The expansion is part of the site’s long-term effort to safely contain waste generated during decades of nuclear weapons production and related cleanup work.
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