A complex plan was drafted to guide the Department of Energy and its contractors as they try to turn 54 million gallons of radioactive waste into glass.

Here's how it's supposed to work:

Delivering the wastes

It's DOE's job to deliver the wastes in the right chemical conditions to the right places at the right times to the two corporate glassification teams.

The corporate teams will accept only wastes that are within four so- called "envelopes" -which define the chemical conditions the glassification plants can handle.

The chemical and radiological parameters of each of these "envelopes" are deliberately wide to ensure the plants can handle potential surprises. However, broad ranges also increase the overall price tag.

The wastes in the first phase will come from 14 extensively studied tanks, but eventually wastes in all 177 tanks will have to be treated.

Hanford's normal tank farm budget is supposed to cover the cost of studying wastes and converting it into conditions acceptable for glassification. And that tank farm budget - especially money for the analyses - usually gets trimmed each year.

Splitting the wastes between two teams

Next year, DOE is set to pick either British Nuclear Fuels or Lockheed Martin Advanced Environmental Systems to build a small, high-level waste glassification plant for the first phase.

Six percent of tank wastes are to be glassified by 2007. If all goes well, DOE would extend the first phase to glassify 13 percent of the wastes by 2011.

The goal is to glassify 2,200 pounds of high-level wastes a day, not enough to justify building two plants, officials say. The most radioactive of the wastes are supposed to go to a proposed underground permanent storage site, most likely at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.

Although only one team will build a high-level plant, both will build a plant to glassify low-level wastes - which make up most of the liquids and sludges in the tanks.

The goal for the low-level plants is to each glassify 22 tons a day. These glassified wastes likely will end up permanently stored in central Hanford in 13,000 boxes, each 4 feet tall, 4 feet wide and 6 feet long.

Several highly radioactive substances first will have to be extracted from the low-level wastes, including cesium, strontium, technetium, transuranic wastes and some others.

The highly radioactive substances will be transferred to various tanks and canisters to be stored until the second phase begins sometime after 2007.

Meanwhile, the low-level wastes will be glassified.

The second phase

The idea is to take the lessons learned in the first phase to build bigger and better plants to glassify the rest of the wastes in Hanford's 177 tanks by 2028. The goals are to glassify 88 to 143 tons of low-level wastes a day, and 6.6 tons of high-level wastes a day.

BNFL and Lockheed hope to tackle the second phase by gradually expanding their first-phase plants.

But the second phase brings some new wrinkles.

Wastes earmarked for the second phase have not been as thoroughly studied as the original 14 tanks. So, continued funding to analyze wastes will still be vital.

Also, the second-phase wastes are expected to include the solids and salt cakes left in tanks after the liquids are pumped out. That presents more waste removal problems.

The plan also tentatively calls for the cesium and strontium currently stored in 1,930 canisters next to central Hanford's B Plant to be glassified in the second phase.