Slowly, slowly, the Energy Department is moving forward with solidifying the liquid nuclear wastes left over from cold-war weapons production. On Thursday, the department said it had closed two more of the 51 underground tanks at the Savannah River Site in western South Carolina. The high-level waste was mixed with molten glass to keep it chemically locked up for millennia, and the lower-level material was mixed with a kind of cement that is supposed to keep it in place until the radioactivity dies down.
The department has 22 tanks at Savannah River that do not meet Environmental Protection Agency standards, mostly because they are single-wall tanks rather than double-wall. It closed two of them in 1997 but has faced numerous technical problems. Now it says it will have four more done by 2014 or 2015, and all of them by 2028. It is starting with the tanks that are closest to the water table because their contents would spread most rapidly if they leaked. (The area has a high water table.)
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