Hanford contractors already had beat a legal deadline to start removing buried radioactive transuranic wastes before the ink was dry on a settlement reached last week.

Under the tentative agreement reached Thursday, Hanford officials had until Nov. 15 to start digging up barrels of the low-level wastes.

On Monday, the site held a small celebration for having begun that task two weeks ago.

"I want to congratulate all the parties involved with this," said U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., during the ceremony.

Nineteen 55-gallon barrels of transuranic wastes were removed from Hanford's 200 West Area burial site before Monday.

The bottom line is that months of political and legal brinkmanship between the state and Department of Energy have translated to actual cleanup work.

Hanford has countless barrels and containers filled with low-level radioactive and transuranic wastes, sometimes mixed with dangerous chemicals. Workers can handle numerous barrels, but many are so radioactive that they can be moved only with not yet developed remote-control equipment.

Some wastes are stored above the ground, but most are buried.

The state and DOE have been feuding over who has the final say on the transuranic wastes, which are highly contaminated junk that will take tens of thousands to millions of years for its radioactivity to decay to almost nothing.

Hanford has enough buried transuranic wastes to potentially fill 75,000 55-gallon barrels and the equivalent of another approximately 9,000 barrels that are stored above-ground. So far, 1,787 barrels of transuranic wastes from the buildings have been shipped to New Mexico.

Last week's tentative agreement added several deadlines to the Tri-Party Agreement that governs Hanford's cleanup for dealing with transuranic wastes by 2018. The agreement must go through some public reviews before being formally adopted.

One major loose end was not settled by the agreement. The state and DOE are in federal court arguing whether unearthed chemically-laced transuranic wastes should be repacked quickly, according to the state's wishes, or repacked at DOE's discretion.

The next deadline is to remove the equivalent of 6,000 55-gallon barrels by Dec. 31, 2004. There are several other deadlines until the work is supposed to be done in 2018.

Right now, Hanford sends an average of two truckloads of about 35 barrels each to New Mexico each week.

The first dug-up transuranic wastes will come from three 200 West Area trenches. Todd Schader, a DOE staff engineer, guessed that possibly half of the barrels will contain transuranic wastes to be sent to New Mexico.

Some of the rest would be low-level radioactive wastes to be reburied at Hanford. The remainder would be chemically-laced wastes not radioactive enough to be declared transuranic.

"This is not easy work. Our hats are off the engineers who figured out ways to do this work so as not to jeopardize the workers," said DOE Hanford Manager Keith Klein.