Hanford remains the nation’s most expensive and technically complex cleanup project, and delays, legal obligations and debates over how to treat tank waste – including whether to vitrify or grout certain wastes – mean the site could still take decades and tens of billions more to fully clean up. 

The first stainless steel containers containing treated wasted are now permanently stored at a designated special disposal facility on the Hanford site. 

Tech giant Amazon will pay $20.5 million to settle with northeast Oregonians living with contaminated groundwater in exchange for no admission of guilt in the polluting.

The first signs of the wine grape growing season have appeared in regional vineyards, about two weeks ahead of the average start of the season.

Benton County is among the locations where the Washington State Department of Agriculture’s Washington Bee Atlas identified a bee species never before recorded in the state.  

Outdoor enthusiasts may need to have their smartphones on them while sitting in their blind or casting lines beginning later this year. 

The Washington State Department of Agriculture is again pressing property owners in Pasco and parts of Kennewick to sign up to have their property treated for invasive Japanese beetles that can devastate numerous crops as well as gardens and lawns. 

The Yakama Nation will receive $4.9 million from the state Department of Commerce to advance several clean energy projects. 

One of the opponents of a proposed wind farm south and west of the Tri-Cities claims the state attorney general’s office left public comments opposing the project out of records transmitted to the Washington Supreme Court.

A recent federal ruling that sets how much water must spill from and stay behind the lower Snake and some Columbia River dams is garnering mixed reactions from advocates for the infrastructure that supports agriculture, energy and transportation needs across the Pacific Northwest.