Most contaminated US nuclear site is set to be the largest solar farm

RICHLAND, Wash. — 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 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 megawatts 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.”

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.

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