Remember the little Dutch boy who put his finger in a hole in a dike?

Hanford's plan for some of its trickiest contamination is suppose to work a bit like that, except the threat isn't from the sea.

In this case, the Dutch boy's fingers are Hanford's five pump-and-treat operations, where ground water laced with contaminants is sucked out of the soil, purified and returned to the ground.

The efforts are aimed at slowing down the huge slow-motion flood of radioactive and hazardous contaminants oozing underground toward the Columbia River.

But now, the five pump-and-treat facilities are overwhelmed and inadequate.

The underground contaminants - a legacy of Hanford's Cold War plutonium production - are winning.

"Now's the time to look for more effective proposals," said Mike Thompson, the Department of Energy's point man on this problem.

But Hanford's experts have only a vague idea what those new proposals could be, and an equally vague idea how fast most substitutes for pump-and-treat operations can be put into effect.

Hanford installed pump-and-treat operations at the fronts of the most dangerous plumes in the mid-1990s - knowing upfront these were just stop-gap measures.

"When we decided to take action initially, we knew these were interim actions," said Doug Sherwood, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Hanford site manager

No one thought pumping and treating would significantly shrink the plumes. Instead, they hoped the facilities would keep the worst contamination from spreading - until someone thought of something better.

Some subterranean spreading has slowed. But the problem of underground contaminants is as big as it was five years ago. The sources and bulks of these plumes remain untouched.

"I think it is high time ... we should do something. There's no point in continuing the same things," said Dib Goswami, Hanford ground water coordinator for Washington's Department of Ecology. Sherwood and Thompson agree.

Subterranean Hanford is a crazy-quilt patchwork of more than 100 radioactive and other contaminants spreading beneath roughly 200 square smiles of the 560-square-mile reservation. About 100 square miles of the reservation's aquifer is polluted above federal drinking water standards.

Not much is understood about the volumes and flows of these contaminants.

Several dozen plumes flow separately or mingle - stretching from central Hanford's 200 Area to most of Hanford's Columbia River shore.

A few are considered the most dangerous, posing potential threats to human health and the Columbia River.

Two are in the 200 West Area - one of non-radioactive carbon tetrachloride and one that is a mix of radioactive uranium and technetium.

Along the river shore, the worst plumes are one of radioactive strontium near N Reactor and three of nonradioactive chromium at the defunct K, D and H reactor complexes.

By now, Hanford has studied the plumes enough to know that more needs to be done, yet no one is sure what might work.

A widespread Hanford problem - finding money - haunts efforts to shrink those plumes. Numerous cleanup projects are competing for a limited amount of cash at the site.

Today's five pump-and-treat operations cost roughly $4 million to
$4.5 million a year to run.

Anything that might actually start shrinking the plumes will cost more money, a lot more.

Here is how efforts to tackle the worst plumes are shaping up:

- The carbon tetrachloride plume beneath most of the 200 West Area.

This 4.4-square-mile plume is universally considered the most dangerous at Hanford. As much as 1,100 tons of this carcinogenic chemical were dumped in the ground near the Plutonium Finishing Plant during the Cold War.

Between the surface and aquifer, carbon tetrachloride spreads horizontally as a vapor, before sinking to the aquifer. So unlike most contaminants, which ooze "down hill" toward the Columbia River, these vapors can spread in any direction.

"It's capable of contaminating the entire unconfined aquifer under the Hanford site," Thompson said.

A pump-and-treat plant is somewhat stalling the horizontal spread of the carbon tetrachloride already in the aquifer.

But the one current vapor extraction plant is not enough to stop the spread of carbon tetrachloride vapors through the ground, Hanford experts say.

Meanwhile, the concentration of carbon tetrachloride in the middle of its plume in the aquifer, near the PFP, is becoming greater and greater.

"The mass is entering the ground water faster than we're removing it," Sherwood said.

A major problem is that Hanford's experts have no idea of the underground locations of 60 percent to 65 percent of the dumped carbon tetrachloride.

How the chemical spreads vertically from the surface to the aquifer 200 feet below also is a puzzle.

Plus, experts suspect a major portion of the carbon tetrachloride is bunched in heavy concentrations at the bottom of the thick aquifer, but they're not sure.

Also, security measures at the PFP - which contains the majority of Hanford's plutonium - have prevented sampling wells from being installed inside the complex's fences.

In 2001, DOE hopes to dig a sampling well near PFP and start hunting and charting the possible carbon tetrachloride concentrations along the aquifer's bottom.

- A narrow uranium-technetium plume going east from the 200 West Area's U Plant region.

This pump-and-treat operation is working well in reducing the amount to technetium in this plume.

But the uranium - which binds with soils and is significantly harder to extract, has defeated Hanford's efforts. In some spots, the uranium concentrations are actually increasing, with questions arising on if the uranium has seeped beyond the 200 West Area.

Goswami noted this plume highlights another Hanford problem.

For almost 50 years, Hanford dumped an estimated 440 billion gallons of contaminated water into the ground, creating rising mounds of water above the aquifer.

Several years ago, Hanford stopped that practice, and the mounds began to drop. As a result, monitoring wells don't reach all the way down to the shrinking mounds.

This creates a need for deeper and additional monitoring wells to collect samples to chart the underground movement of contaminants.

- A small strontium plume reaching the Columbia River next to N Reactor.

This pump-and-treat plant has accomplished very little. The 0.31-square-mile area holds 76 to 88 curies of radioactive strontium, a substance that can cause bone cancer in extremely small concentrations. Most of this strontium is in the soil above the aquifer.

In five years, the pump-and-treat plant has removed a minuscule 0.7 curie of strontium from the aquifer. Essentially, the plant is keeping strontium from the river, but not cleaning up the site.

Thompson and Goswami agree that something else should be tried.

Possibilities include inserting a concrete-like curtain into the ground with an opening covered by strontium-filtering material. Another idea is to flush the strontium down to the aquifer and pump out the strontium-laced water.

Other concepts are to crystallize the strontium in the ground, or to plant trees whose roots will draw out the contaminated water.

"We need ... some funds to look at these alternatives, and this is not happening," Goswami said.

No definite timetable has been set to tackle the strontium problem.

- Three chromium plumes at the K, D and H reactors' areas.

Each of these plumes are a square mile or less in size, oozing into the Columbia River. This chemical poses a much greater threat to the baby salmon hatching just offshore that it does to humans.

But it's also Hanford's brightest spot in tackling underground contaminants, cleanup experts agree.

At DR Reactor, Hanford has experimented with injecting sodium dithionite into the ground to create a subterranean chemical wall that alters the chromium seeping through it into a much less harmful substance.

This method has worked well, and Hanford plans to expand the 150-feet-wide chemical barrier to 2,230 feet by 2002 at D and DR reactors for a total cost of roughly $10 million.

But no timetables or budgets have been set yet to create similar chemical walls to filter the seeping chromium at the K and H reactors' areas.

A major hurdle is figuring out how much money is needed to install the chemical barriers at the other chromium plumes, and finding that money, DOE officials said.