Hanford plans to remove or dispose of roughly 263 tons of leftover uranium by March 31.

That means almost half of the stockpile of uranium Hanford had at the beginning of 2000 will be disposed of in about seven weeks.

The uranium was originally intended to be used for reactor fuel in Hanford's Cold War plutonium production days. Since the Cold War, it had been stored in various forms in the 200 Area and 300 Area.

The 200 Area's uranium -- actually 734 tons of uranium trioxide powder -- was shipped to the Department of Energy's Portsmouth, Ohio, site for permanent storage last year.

Over the next two months, DOE plans to:

-- Ship 258 tons of uranium billets from the 300 Area to Portsmouth. Billets are heavy 20-inch-long cylinders that hold uranium.

-- Ship another 2.6 tons of uranium dioxide pellets to Portsmouth.

-- Ship another 0.44 tons of uraniumdioxide to DOE's Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico for research purposes.

-- Bury another 1.76 tons of uranium dioxide -- which is not wanted elsewhere -- in central Hanford.

That will leave 1,056 tons of uranium in billetlike cylinders ranging from 1 foot to slightly more than 2 feet long. Out of that amount, DOE plans to bury roughly 149 tons of nonirradiated uranium fuel in central Hanford by June, said Leo Guillen, DOE's project manager for uranium disposal.

The remaining 907 tons will stay in the 300 Area until DOE reaches a formal decision on what to do with a major amount of Hanford's solid wastes.

That decision is scheduled for September 2002 after an environmental impact study is completed.

Copyright 2001 Tri-City Herald.