Think of a line of dominoes stretching from central Hanford's T Plant to the K Basins near the Columbia River.

T Plant failed a test in late October. That failure could ripple dominolike over to the K Basins, maybe stalling the removal of radioactive sludge there.

The question is: Can the T Plant project get back on track fast enough so no ripple effect occurs?

"It's too early to tell," said Pete Knollmeyer, the Department of Energy's assistant manager for Hanford's central plateau. October's test run was to see if T Plant was ready to remove commercial spent nuclear fuel from a water-filled pool so the chamber can then receive sludge from the K Basins.

Fluor Hanford agrees with DOE's criticism of the October test run and plans to submit a remedial plan by Christmas, said Fluor spokesman Jerry Holloway. After that it is unknown when DOE will schedule another Fluor test run, which it must pass to begin the nine-month fuel removal at T Plant.

Hanford is supposed to start removing the 17.4 tons of fuel from T Plant this month or in January, completing the project by Sept. 30.

That operation's success or failure will influence Hanford's chances of cleaning out the K Basins by the August 2004 legal deadline.

Last year the state and DOE moved the K Basins completion deadline from 2005 to 2004. A major factor in that acceleration is cutting one year from the sludge removal -- the last step in the K Basins project.

T Plant is one of Hanford's five World War II and Cold War "canyons," which are monster-size chemical plants that extracted plutonium-laced liquids from irradiated uranium reactor fuel rods.

Four of these canyons face probable futures as permanent, low-tech waste dumps. However, T Plant is earmarked as a processing and storage facility for several cleanup projects.

T Plant is Hanford's oldest and most historic canyon. It helped create Hanford's first plutonium in World War II. It is also the source of 1949's "Green Run" -- Hanford's most notorious secret Cold War airborne emission of radioactive gases that floated off the site. T Plant is set up similar to the other four canyons. Its mostly empty main chamber is several hundred feet long and at least five stories tall. Much of its floor consists of thick concrete lids that cover a series of square underground chambers that held the complicated chemical equipment that extracted plutonium from the reactor rods.

Hanford removed the equipment from one of those basement chambers and filled it with water. Then in the late 1970s, DOE put that commercial spent nuclear fuel from Pennsylvania's Shippingport reactor into that pool for storage. Shippingport is the nation's oldest commercial nuclear reactor.

As a result, T Plant's pool holds 72 nuclear fuel assemblies that are 14 feet long and 6 inches square.

Meanwhile, one of Hanford's top priorities is to remove 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel from the leak-prone K West and K East Basins that are 400 yards from the Columbia River.

Until mid-2000, the Tri-Party Agreement, the legal pact governing Hanford's cleanup had a mid-2005 deadline for DOE to remove all fuel and radioactive sludges from the K Basins.

Most of the 72 cubic yards of sludge is in the K East Basin. Then DOE and Washington's Department of Ecology renegotiated the Tri-Party Agreement, so now all K Basins fuel must be removed by July 2004 and all sludge by August 2004. Originally the sludge work was a major factor in the initial mid-2005 deadline.

The K Basins' fuel is going to a huge underground vault in central Hanford. The sludge will be put in containers and stored underwater in the T Plant pool that currently holds the Shippingport nuclear fuel. Eventually the packed sludge will go to a permanent underground storage site in New Mexico.

T Plant is supposed to be ready to receive its first K Basins sludge in December 2002. That's why DOE wants the Shippingport fuel out of that pool by Sept. 30. The Shippingport fuel is to go to the same vault as the K Basins' nuclear fuel, but Fluor needs to pass a formal DOE test to prove it is ready to start removing the Shippingport fuel.

That's the test Fluor failed in late October.

Knollmeyer said Fluor's operators appeared to know their jobs, but the individual segments of Fluor's operation were not effectively meshed together to guarantee the project could be tackled safely and efficiently, Knollmeyer said.

Another glitch is that DOE's New Mexico underground storage facility has strict criteria governing the wastes it accepts. During the test, Fluor's T Plant operation could not provide documents and other proof that its future sludge-filled canisters will meet the New Mexico site's requirements, Knollmeyer said.