The wastes stored in underground tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation are so dangerous that their fumes give people headaches, nosebleeds and sore throats and make them nauseated.

An unfortunate few have been doused with the deadly stuff in accidents; one now is dying of cancer.

Called by state regulators “the most toxic waste known to this environment,” the 53 million gallons of waste sit in 177 massive, buried tanks near the Columbia River. Intended for short-term use, some of the tanks are more than a half-century old. They were built of carbon steel — an alloy prone to corrosion. They are cocooned in concrete that in places has cracked and crumbled. The contents historically boiled and exploded, and the tank bottoms buckled. More than one-third leaked.

The tanks are supposed to be emptied and the waste safely trapped in glass, but those plans keep getting pushed back. At the current rate of funding, tanks at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation won’t be emptied for decades — maybe even a century.

Those delays are raising a question no one dared ask a few years ago: Is it time to build new tanks?

It’s a proposition that has been avoided for fear that it would cost too much and give the Energy Department, the agency responsible for Hanford, license to further drag its feet in cleaning up the waste.

But most of the existing tanks should have been decommissioned years ago. The older ones are 30 to 50 years past their intended lifetime. Even the newer tanks — the last ones were built in 1986 — likely will be years past their life span before they’re taken out of use.

“These things are falling apart in the ground while we speak,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge, a watchdog group. “You’ve got to do something. You can’t just hope that something bad is not going to happen.”

Some of the risks are catastrophic — tanks so rotted that they collapse under the weight of pumps and other gear used to remove the waste, or shake apart in an earthquake.

“We have reminded (the Energy Department) that a collapsed tank out there would just be a devastating issue,” said Russell Jim, manager of the Environmental Restoration/Waste Management Program for the Yakama Nation.

A much more likely threat is continued leaking, or leaking triggered when the tank contents are blasted with liquids to loosen up solid chunks so they can be pumped out. Already about 1.2 million gallons of waste have leaked from the tanks. The waste hasn’t reached the Columbia River, but it has seeped into pools of groundwater deep beneath the tanks. There is a lot of uncertainty as to when the polluted groundwater will reach the river — estimates range from 30 to 200 years.

Liquid waste was moved in recent years from the 149 older, single-shell tanks to the 28 newer, double-shell tanks. The single shells now hold about 30 million gallons of sludge and chunky salt cakes, and about 3 million gallons of liquid that couldn’t be extracted. The risk of leaks was significantly reduced — but not eliminated.

“We could not tell you that there are no leaks happening today based on the monitoring they have,” said Jane Hedges, the nuclear waste manager for the state Ecology Department, which is responsible for making sure the cleanup is done right.

The strategy for dealing with the tanks is to transfer all of the waste — not just the liquids — from the single-shell to the double-shell tanks. Then that waste is treated in enormous plants where it is “vitrified,” or turned to glass. The glass would then be stored for thousands of years.

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