Hanford transferred the first cask of spent nuclear fuel from K East Basin to K West Basin on Monday, starting a fuel juggling act aimed at trimming costs at the high-profile project.

Monday's fuel transfer also beats Fluor Hanford's deadline of having to accomplish that feat by Saturday, said Norm Boyter, Fluor's vice president for the K Basins project.

The K Basins are two indoor, water-filled and leak-prone pools that hold 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel 400 yards from the Columbia River. Hanford's master plan is to move that fuel to an underground vault in central Hanford.

Movement is complicated.

It involves moving and washing fuel underwater, then loading it into special cylindrical containers called multicanister overpacks, or MCOs -- also underwater. The MCOs are then removed from the water, processed and trucked to the underground vault.

This work is under way in the K West Basin, which originally held 1,053 tons of fuel in closed containers.

Working in the K West Basin is easier than doing all the underwater procedures in the K East Basin because much of the K East fuel is corroding and in open-ended containers. That means chips and clouds of radioactive fuel and debris swirl throughout the water when the fuel is moved in the K East Basin. That problem does not exist with the K West fuel.

Consequently, the Department of Energy and Fluor decided not to install the expensive underwater equipment in the K East Basin to load spent fuel into MCOs. Instead, Hanford is moving the K East fuel to K West where all the equipment is already set up.

Moving K East fuel consists of putting the fuel containers into a big cask, pulling the cask out of the pool, packing that cask in a bigger container, and moving everything a few hundred feet to K West. There, casks are emptied into the K West pool.

Loose fuel bits and specks are vacuumed in the water as the fuel is moved inside the K East Basin. The open-ended fuel containers relocated to K West are located near a water purification system can keep the pool from being junked up.

It takes two trips from K East to K West to move enough fuel to fill one MCO, Boyter said.

The Tri-Party Agreement, the legal pact governing Hanford's cleanup, calls for the K East Basin to be emptied by May 31, 2004.

The Tri-Party Agreement also calls for all the K West Basin's original 1,053 tons of fuel to be removed by Dec. 31. As of Wednesday, Fluor had moved about 865 tons of K West fuel.

By another measure, Fluor has moved 153 MCOs of K West fuel and it needs to reach 184 MCOs by Dec. 31. Right now, Fluor is moving five MCOs per week. At that pace, Fluor appears likely to miss the deadline by almost two weeks.