Most contaminated U.S. nuclear site is set to be the largest solar farm
In the weeks since President Donald Trump has taken office, he has pushed to unleash oil and gas production and has signed executive orders halting the country's transition to renewable energy.
But in Washington state, a government-led effort has just started to build what is expected to be the country's largest solar generating station. The project is finally inching forward, after decades of cleaning up radioactive and chemical waste in fits and starts, at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a sweep of desert that was pivotal to the nation's weapons arsenal from 1943 until it was shut down in 1989. A developer, Hecate, was brought on last year to turn big stretches of the site into solar farms.
Hecate will have access to 10,300 acres that the government has determined sufficiently safe to redevelop. The company has already started site evaluation on 8,000 acres, an area nearly 10 times the size of Central Park in New York and enough space for 3.45 million photovoltaic panels. (Hanford's site is about 400,000 acres.)
If all goes according to plan, the Hecate project, which is expected to be completed in 2030, will be by far the largest site the government has cleaned up and converted from land that had been used for nuclear research, weapons and waste storage. It is expected to generate up to 2,000 megawatts of electricity — enough roughly to supply all the homes in Seattle, San Francisco and Denver — and store 2,000 more in a large battery installation at a total cost of $4 billion. The photovoltaic panels and batteries will provide twice as much energy as a conventional nuclear power plant. The nation's current biggest solar plant, the Copper Mountain Solar Facility in Nevada, can generate up to 802 megawatts of energy.
The big unknown still hanging over the plan is whether the Trump administration will thwart efforts that the Biden administration put in place to develop more clean electricity generation.
Jennifer Granholm, until recently the energy secretary, said she was "hopeful that they will see the benefit of being able to reuse these lands for something that is really beneficial to the nation.'
"These sites were developed to protect our national security,' she said in an interview. "Letting the sites just go fallow is not consistent with protecting, necessarily, our national or energy security.'
The remote desert landscape around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a site that was integral to the nation's nuclear arsenal after World War II, north of Richland, Washington, in 2023.
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Mason Trinca / The New York Times
Dan Reicher, who served as assistant secretary of energy efficiency and renewable energy in the Clinton administration, also defended the plan. The Energy Department's agreements with Hecate are not the government's "spending taxpayer dollars to build energy generation,' he said, but rather its "having made real progress on cleaning up the site, seeking a private developer and now moving ahead.'
While a clean energy project may clash with Trump's policies, there's a reason the administration may allow Hecate's solar development to move forward: the revenue the government will get for the land lease. Hecate and the Energy Department declined to discuss the land's market value, but private solar developers in the region said such easements typically paid landowners $300 an acre annually.
Two officials at the Energy Department, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said that neither the president nor the leaders of the administration's effort to reshape federal agencies had yet to intervene in the solar project, but that the future of the initiative was uncertain. One of the officials said the new energy secretary, Chris Wright, a former oil executive, had not yet reviewed the project as of late February.
Alex Pugh, Hecate's director of development, said the company was moving ahead despite shifting political winds. "The fundamentals of the project are strong regardless of policy direction,' he said. "The region needs the project. There is a huge demand for electricity here.'
Demand for power in the Pacific Northwest is increasing as more data centers are being built to power artificial intelligence. Businesses in the cities closest to Hanford — Kennewick, Pasco and Richland — and organizations pushing for job creation in the region formed the Tri-City Development Council, which has been encouraging clean energy and other environmentally safe industrial development on the federal reservation.
Hecate identified the large expanse of open ground alongside high-voltage transmission lines at Hanford as a potential site for its plant several years ago, Pugh said — long before the Energy Department solicited proposals. The potential benefits, he said, were plainly apparent.
"It's a big plus for the region,' he said. "Future investors, take note: They'll have the land. They'll have water. They'll have tax incentives for development. They'll have 2,000 megawatts coming online, potentially by the end of the decade. Everything that a developer would want.'
What they also have, however, is risk. The site where Hecate plans to build its photovoltaic panels is near an area where groundwater and soil were decontaminated and alongside an experimental 400-megawatt nuclear reactor complex that was decommissioned in 2001. It's also about 20 miles south of B Reactor, the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor, which produced the plutonium for the atomic bomb used on Nagasaki, Japan.
Tanks that are part of a cesium removal system at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a site that was integral to the nation's nuclear arsenal after World War II, north of Richland, Washington, in 2023.
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Mason Trinca / The New York Times
Hecate, which has operated and developed solar stations in 12 states and is 40% owned by Repsol, a Spanish oil and gas company, is proceeding with caution at Hanford. "The potential risk at the site is if we find contaminated soil, contaminated water — something nobody knew about,' Pugh said.
Hanford produced two-thirds of America's plutonium for nuclear weapons that were deployed during World War II and the Cold War. When the site was decommissioned, 54 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge was left behind in underground tanks filled with boiling liquid. The site also encompassed radioactive research and production buildings and huge stretches of poisoned land that was leaching toxic waste toward the Columbia River 6 miles away.
The Energy Department started an initiative in 1990 to demolish the old laboratories and manufacturing buildings and clear the nuclear reservation of hazards, but the plan became tangled with complications of developing technology to handle especially poisonous waste and federal budget cuts in 2013 and 2019. Design defects, for instance, halted construction in 2012 of a five-story, 137,000-square-foot chemical treatment plant to reduce the risk of radioactive sludge after $4 billion had already been spent.
At one point, the government considered leaving the leftover waste buried forever in the underground tanks. Just since 2017, the government has spent $20 billion for Hanford's cleanup, which is not expected to end until late this century.
Initially, business leaders were concerned about the scale of Hecate's plan. But the Tri-City Development Council, which leases 1,641 acres from the federal government at the Hanford site, has come around, largely because Hecate's energy can help recruit big projects that need the power to the area. One that has recently arrived is Atlas Agro, which is spending $1 billion on an agricultural fertilizer plant that has lower greenhouse gas emissions and reduces the pollution risk to water.
"We would not have been supportive if we just flooded this whole area with solar,' said Sean V. O'Brien, director of the Energy Forward Alliance, a unit of the development council. "We don't think that's the best economic development and job creator. We're all about the mix here.'
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