Fluor Hanford moved its first batch of spent nuclear fuel from the K Basins on Thursday, a major milestone that came despite equipment glitches and restrictive Department of Energy oversight.

Problems with an underwater camera kept workers from moving radioactive waste from the K-West Basin for several hours, but by day's end, the active cleanup of Hanford's second-worst environmental problem was under way.

Fluor Hanford spent six years designing and building equipment to manipulate the 2,100 tons of spent nuclear fuel stored in two huge indoor pools called the K Basins.

It will be another six years before all the waste is removed from the aging storage site, which is just 400 yards from the Columbia River, and stored in a safer, more secure facility eight miles away.

Keith Klein, DOE's Hanford manager, called the movement of the first fuel away from the K Basins a momentous occasion for the site.

"The spent nuclear fuel project is the cornerstone of our effort to clean up the river corridor," he said. "What we are showing the taxpayers is we can deliver."

The K Basin cleanup will remove more than 98 percent of the existing radiation from close proximity to the Columbia River.

Though safe for now, the two K Basin facilities -- east and west -- have not always been the safest repository for spent fuel. They were built in the early 1950s to provide temporary storage for spent fuel and outlived their useful life decades ago. The east basin is particularly thorny, having leaked in the past, though not now.

Fuel in the East Basin is also in worse shape because it was stored in uncovered canisters, which means there is more radioactive sludge and debris there than in the West Basin.

Hanford officials opted to start moving fuel from the West Basin because that site offers operators a better chance to perfect the removal process than the East Basin.

Dave Van Leuven, Fluor executive vice president, defended the decision to start the cleanup at the West Basin, saying cleanup of the trickier storage site would follow in time.

"We are on a very fast track to get to that East Basin. East Basin is leak tight. There really are no increased risks," he said.

Under the Tri-Party agreement, all fuel is to be removed from both basins by 2004. The agreement between the state, DOE and the U.S Environmental Protection Agency set a 30-year timetable to clean up Hanford.

To move submerged fuel from the two Basins, Fluor Hanford and its partners had to design and develop new equipment to manipulate the containers that hold the spent fuel.

Remote-controlled equipment allows operators to pick up the containers and moved them underwater to a cleaning station.

The spent fuel assemblies are removed from the containers, then inspected and measured. The fuel rods are then placed in a basket, which is loaded into a steel traveling canister.

Only then is the spent fuel removed from its watery storage pool. From there, the canister is moved to a drying facility and trucked to the new Canister Storage facility about eight miles away.

The facility has about 220 tubes each 40-feet deep that can store a total of 440 of the steel canisters. Waste from the K Basins is expected to fill about 400 canisters.

The storage facility is designed to operate for about 40 years and to be resistant to extreme weather as well as seismic activity. In the future, the building will be used to treat radioactive waste after it has been treated at the yet-to-be-built glassification plant.

Facility manager Oly Serrano said the first spent nuclear fuel removed from the K Basins would spend several days in the drying facility before being shipped to his building.

K Basin waste is second only to Hanford's leaky underground radioactive waste tanks in total contamination.