Most Contaminated U.S. Nuclear Site Is Set to Be the Largest Solar Farm.

Plans to transform Hanford, which was integral to the nation’s nuclear arsenal after World War II, had just begun inching forward when President Trump started his second term.

New York Times, By Keith Schneider, Reporting from Richland, Wash, March 5, 2025,

In the weeks since President 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 nearly 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………………………………………….

While a clean energy project may clash with Mr. 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.”

…………………….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, Mr. Pugh said — long before the Energy Department solicited proposals. The potential benefits, he said, were plainly apparent.

………………….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