A tunnel containing radioactive waste caved in at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Richland on Tuesday morning, forcing nearly 4,800 workers to take cover indoors. 
 
 Thousands of workers at the Hanford nuclear reservation in Richland were forced to take cover indoors after a tunnel containing radioactive waste collapsed Tuesday morning, government officials said. 
 
 Nearly 4,800 workers at the nuclear site were told to shelter indoors, an Energy Department spokeswoman said. At around noon Tuesday, workers outside of the facility where the cave-in occurred were cleared and sent home early. 
 
 At around 1:35 p.m., five hours after the incident was declared an emergency, remaining workers were allowed to go home. About 3,000 workers had been sheltering in a facility near the collapse in the 200 East Area, which houses an old plutonium-processing facility. 
 
 Nonessential swing-shift workers were told to stay home Tuesday evening. On Wednesday morning, nonessential workers who report north of the site’s Wye Barricade were told to stay home. 
 
 There was no indication of a radiation release, but crews were continuing to survey for contamination, the department said. Crews were hand-surveying outer areas around the tunnels, but closer to the breach were using a remote-controlled device that can do radiological monitoring and take video. 
 
 “The Department of Energy informed us this morning that a tunnel was breached that was used to bury radioactive waste from the production of plutonium at the Hanford nuclear reservation,” Gov. Jay Inslee said. “This is a serious situation and ensuring the safety of the workers and the community is the top priority.” 
 
 Inslee said the White House had reached out to his office. 
 
 “Our understanding is that the site went into immediate lockdown in which workers were told to seek shelter and all access to the area has been closed,” Inslee said. 
 
 Emergency officials restricted flights from passing over the Hanford nuclear reservation, a 580-square-mile area bordering the Columbia River. 
 
 Beginning in 1943 and lasting for more than 40 years, Hanford made plutonium for nuclear weapons, including for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. About 8,000 people are currently working on a massive cleanup that is expected to cost more than $100 billion and last through 2060. 
 
 “This is sort of a forgotten legacy of the nuclear age,” said Paul Carroll, who is the director of programs for the nuclear-nonproliferation group Ploughshares Fund and previously worked on nuclear cleanup programs for the Department of Energy. “We don’t know how to deal with this stuff.” 
 
 On Tuesday morning, about six Hanford employees, on routine rounds, noticed that an area of soil over one of the tunnels had sunk, Destry Henderson, an Energy Department spokesman, said. 
 
 “At that point after noticing the soil had sunk over one of the tunnels there was an emergency declared,” Henderson said. “Upon an additional investigation, crews noticed a portion of that tunnel had fallen, the roof had caved in about a 20-foot section of that tunnel which is more than 100 feet long.” 
 
 Railcars filled with radioactive waste are buried in the wood and concrete tunnels, which are covered by about 8 feet of soil. 
 
 A 20-by-20-foot area of soil above the tunnels “subsided,” the Department of Energy said Tuesday, significantly upgrading the scale of the breach from its previous estimate. Earlier, the department had estimated the size of the breached roof area at about 4 feet by 4 feet. 
 
 The Department of Energy opened an emergency operations center at the site just before 8:30 a.m. 
 
 The incident was initially declared an “alert emergency,” the lowest level of emergency classification at the site, but was later upgraded to a “site area emergency.” A site-area emergency is limited to the boundaries of the Hanford site but could affect staff beyond the immediate facility. 
 
 “No action is required for residents of Benton and Franklin counties,” the department said. Nearly 275,000 people live in the two counties that border the site. 
 
 The 200 East Area where the incident occurred is located in the center of the reservation. It is home to the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Plant, also known as PUREX, a massive facility more than three football fields in length that was used to recover plutonium from irradiated uranium fuel rods. 
 
 The building, which extends 40 feet below ground and is more than six stories tall, has been vacant for nearly 20 years but remains highly contaminated. 
 
 The PUREX facility is about 19 miles from north Richland and seven miles from the Columbia River. 
 
 In 2016, in an advisory letter to Department of Energy officials, the Hanford Advisory Board asked officials to “expeditiously investigate whether the PUREX tunnels pose a high risk and, if so, to then negotiate milestones to begin planning for their remediation.” 
 
 Tom Carpenter, executive director of Hanford Challenge, a nonprofit that works to hold the Department of Energy accountable on its cleanup efforts, called Tuesday’s cave-in a “wake-up call.” 
 
 “They’ve got 177 underground nuclear-waste tanks, most of them were built in the 1940s,” Carpenter said. “If this were a tank that had collapsed that would be much, much worse than anything you hear right now. They need to get on top of their risks.” ||||| HANFORD – Thousands of Hanford workers streamed out of the Washington nuclear reservation Tuesday while operators huddled to find a fix for a gaping hole in the roof of a tunnel that entombs rail cars full of radioactive equipment. 
 
 State and federal officials sought to ease fears of a leak of radioactive material, saying monitoring at the site shows no evidence of a release. 
 
 “The incident is moving from the emergency phase towards the recovery phase,” the Department of Energy said Tuesday evening. “The workforce has safely left the site, other than personnel essential to the recovery plan.” 
 
 Energy Secretary Rick Perry received briefings on the situation throughout Tuesday, his office said. After extensive testing at the site, “there has been no indication of worker exposure or an airborne radiological release,” Perry’s office said. 
 
 Workers discovered the hole in the tunnel next to a closed facility known as the PUREX plant, short for Plutonium Uranium Extraction, near the center of Hanford. The radioactive waste contained in the tunnel is a byproduct of the nation’s effort to develop enough plutonium to fuel nuclear weapons from World War II through the Cold War. 
 
 “Emergency responders are out there to make sure the site remains secure,” said Destry Henderson, spokesman for the Hanford Site Emergency Operation Center. “Folks are meeting to develop a recovery plan.” 
 
 But exactly how the hole, estimated at 400 square feet, will be plugged or covered – and how long that will take – remained unclear Tuesday. Officials said they are exploring placing a barrier between the contaminated equipment inside and the outside air without causing the hole to grow bigger. 
 
 “Certainly the cleanup includes technical challenges and hazards,” Henderson said. “Sometimes you run into unexpected situations like this and our employees are figuring out a path forward to deal with it.” 
 
 No workers were injured Tuesday, said Randy Bradbury, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology. As a precaution, nearby employees were evacuated and private pilots told not to fly over the sprawling reservation, which is half the size of Rhode Island and located 124 miles southwest of Spokane. 
 
 Workers near PUREX noticed the cave-in during routine monitoring, and the Hanford emergency center was activated at 8:26 a.m. There were no workers inside the tunnel when it collapsed. But nearby workers were evacuated as a precaution, the Department of Energy said. 
 
 Employees close to the PUREX plant were first advised to take shelter indoors, and that was expanded to cover several thousand employees within Hanford’s security boundary. By noon most workers were told to leave work early as a precaution. 
 
 By early afternoon cars were streaming out along the two-lane highway leading away from Hanford’s Vitrification Plant, a facility under construction that will turn liquid radioactive waste into glass chunks. 
 
 Hanford Patrol officers, who barred any filming of their officers or car under penalty of arrest, stopped vehicles from approaching at least five miles from the site of the tunnel collapse well within the 580-square mile reservation. 
 
 One contractor, who said he could not give his name, said he was forced to park and wait more than three hours after the emergency was declared. He eventually was allowed to pass through a checkpoint at 2:45 p.m. 
 
 Several other vans containing Radiological Control officers passed the same checkpoint. Those employees used hand-held detection devices which showed no contamination had been released from the tunnel, Henderson said. Closer to the collapse site, crews used a remote-operated device to monitor for possible radiological releases and take video footage of the hole. 
 
 “The fundamental goal is employee safety,” Henderson said. Hanford has more than 9,000 employees. “We need to find out what happened, why it happened and mitigate the problem. Today our response was a precaution as we were determining the extent of the potential hazard.” 
 
 Around 1:35 p.m. the last of the employees in the vicinity of the tunnel was released from work early. Non-essential employees were released from work early or told not to report to work for swing shifts Tuesday night. 
 
 Workers considered essential for site operations were told to avoid the emergency area, which is 19 miles from North Richland and about 7 miles from the Columbia River. 
 
 The cave-in occurred where two tunnels – one about 360 feet long and the other about 1,700 feet long – join together east of the PUREX plant. They were built during the Cold War to store contaminated equipment from plutonium production operations at the plant. 
 
 An unnamed source told NBC affiliate KING that crews doing road work may have created a vibration that caused part of the tunnel to collapse. Henderson said he was not able to confirm that. 
 
 “A serious situation’ 
 
 Gov. Jay Inslee was notified about the tunnel breach by the Energy Department and the White House on Tuesday morning. Inslee called the event “a serious situation.” 
 
 “Federal, state and local officials are coordinating closely on the response,” Inslee said, with the state Ecology Department in close communication with the Energy Department. 
 
 There were no plans for Inslee, who made several previously planned stops in Skamania County on Tuesday, to go to Hanford, his staff said. 
 
 Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell said they were monitoring the situation closely and that safety should be the top priority. 
 
 “The initial reports are no one has been hurt but we are watching this very closely,” Murray said. 
 
 Cantwell said the Energy Department and its contractors need to find out whether the subsidence in the tunnels has resulted in an environmental contamination. 
 
 Hanford’s nuclear legacy Hanford played a key role in the top-secret Manhattan Project, the race by the United States and its allies during World War II to produce an atomic bomb before the Germans. Here’s a look at key locations at Hanford, including locations where efforts have been underway for years to clean up the 586-square-mile site’s radioactive and chemical wastes. | MAP » 
 
 “My thoughts are with the first responders who are working to assess the situation on the ground, monitor any environmental impacts and design next steps for securing the area,” she said. 
 
 The state and the federal government have been locked in years of litigation over cleanup of nuclear waste at Hanford that is a legacy of the nation’s weapons programs from World War II and the Cold War. 
 
 State Rep. Gerry Pollet, a Seattle Democrat who serves as director for Hanford cleanup watchdog group Heart of America Northwest, said the fact that a tunnel collapse or other radiation leak from the PUREX site hasn’t happened sooner is “just luck.” 
 
 “This disaster was predicted and shows the federal Energy Department’s utter recklessness in seeking decades of delay for Hanford Cleanup, and Washington State’s and EPA’s dereliction in agreeing to those delays,” Pollet said in a press release. 
 
 Walls held up by timbers 
 
 Hanford was built during World War II and made the plutonium for most of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of the war. 
 
 The closed PUREX plant was used to chemically process irradiated fuel rods to remove plutonium for weapons. It was built in the 1950s and operated from 1956 to 1972 and again from 1983 to 1990. 
 
 PUREX plant dumping ground For decades during the Cold War arms race, nuclear waste was dumped at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation’s sprawling 200 East and 200 West areas. The PUREX plant, a massive concrete bunker the length of three football fields that chemically extracted plutonium from nuclear fuel rods, is in the 200 East area. It was built in 1955 and closed in 1990. | READ MORE » 
 
 Henderson said the tunnel in question was about 360 feet long and contained eight flatbed rail cars built in the 1950s and 1960s full of highly contaminated materials and equipment from the plant were backed into the waste disposal tunnels at the plant and left there as a disposal method. 
 
 The flatbed train cars “were built to hold contaminated material that were large pieces of former plutonium processing equipment that were too large to be stored elsewhere,” Henderson said. 
 
 Last year, a new legal deadline was set requiring the Department of Energy to start some work toward assessing the waste disposal tunnels by September 2017. 
 
 But Henderson said he checked and found no active plans to deal with the tunnels. “The focus of the facility was to just monitor in place,” he said. 
 
 Hanford has the nation’s largest depository of radioactive defense waste needing clean up. The site contains about 56 million gallons of radioactive waste, most of it in 177 underground tanks. 
 
 Although the Trump administration has vowed to slash the budgets of most Energy Department programs, the administration does not plan to skimp on the department’s program charged with the Hanford cleanup and with other nuclear sites. It has requested $6.5 billion for agency’s environmental management program for 2018. 
 
 This report contains information from Spokesman-Review reporters Thomas Clouse, Jim Camden and Becky Kramer, as well as The Tri-City Herald and Washington Post. ||||| FILE - In this July 9, 2014 file photo, a sign informs visitors of prohibited items on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Wash. An emergency has been declared Tuesday, May 9, 2017, at the... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this July 9, 2014 file photo, a sign informs visitors of prohibited items on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Wash. An emergency has been declared Tuesday, May 9, 2017, at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation after a portion of a tunnel that contained rail cars full of nuclear waste... (Associated Press) 
 
 RICHLAND, Wash. (AP) — The collapse of an underground tunnel containing radioactive waste that forced workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation to shelter in place is the latest incident to raise safety concerns at the sprawling site that made plutonium for nuclear bombs for decades after World War II. 
 
 Officials detected no release of radiation Tuesday and no workers were injured, said Randy Bradbury, a spokesman for the Washington state Department of Ecology. 
 
 No workers were inside the tunnel when it collapsed, causing soil on the surface above to sink 2 to 4 feet (half to 1.2 meters) over a 400 square foot (37 square meters) area, officials said. 
 
 The tunnels are hundreds of feet long, with about 8 feet (2.4 meters) of soil covering them, the U.S. Department of Energy said. 
 
 The anti-nuclear group Beyond Nuclear said the incident helped show "radioactive waste management is out of control." 
 
 Democratic U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington said worker safety must be the priority. 
 
 "My thoughts are with the first responders who are working to assess the situation on the ground," she said. 
 
 Worker safety has long been a concern at Hanford, which is located about 200 miles (322 kilometers) southeast of Seattle. 
 
 Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a lawsuit last fall against the Energy Department and its contractor, Washington River Protection Solutions, contending vapors released from underground nuclear waste tanks posed a serious risk to workers. 
 
 Ferguson said that since the early 1980s, hundreds of workers have been exposed to vapors escaping from the tanks and that those breathing the vapors developed nosebleeds, chest and lung pain, headaches, coughing, sore throats, irritated eyes and difficulty breathing. 
 
 Lawyers for the Energy Department have said no evidence has been provided showing workers have been harmed by vapors. 
 
 The cause of the collapse was not immediately known. It was discovered Tuesday as part of a routine inspection and occurred during a massive cleanup that has been underway since the 1980s and costs more than $2 billion a year. The work is expected to take until 2060 and cost more than $100 billion. 
 
 Hanford officials said they were studying the area of the collapse to determine how to create a barrier between the contaminated equipment in the tunnel and the outside air. 
 
 Workers near the site were evacuated and hundreds of others farther away were told to remain indoors for several hours, the federal agency said. 
 
 Non-essential workers among the labor force of 9,000 at the site were sent home early along a safe route. 
 
 "No action is currently required for residents of Benton and Franklin counties," the Energy Department said, referring to the nearly 300,000 residents near the site about 200 miles southeast of Seattle. "There is no indication of a release of contamination at this point." 
 
 U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry was briefed on the incident that Washington Gov. Jay Inslee called a serious situation. 
 
 "Ensuring the safety of the workers and the community is the top priority," said Inslee, a Democrat who previously represented the Hanford region in Congress. 
 
 The accident occurred at a plant known as the Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility, or PUREX, located in the middle of the 500-square-mile (1,295-square-kilometer) Hanford site — half the size of Rhode Island. 
 
 The PUREX building is the length of three football fields and was used to recover plutonium from irradiated fuel rods. 
 
 Hanford for decades made plutonium for nuclear weapons and is now the nation's largest depository of radioactive defense waste, with about 56 million gallons of waste, most of it in 177 underground tanks. 
 
 As part of the huge, ongoing cleanup, rail cars full of radioactive waste were often driven into tunnels and buried. 
 
 The senior Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee said he is requesting that the Energy Department brief the committee on the root cause of the collapse. 
 
 New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone said the incident underscores the need for the department to take all necessary precautions to ensure the safety and security of workers. 
 
 The committee oversees the department's management of the cleanup efforts. 
 
 The Hanford site was built during World War II and made plutonium for most of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, including the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of the war. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Geranios reported from Spokane, Washington. Associated Press writer Matthew Daly in Washington, D.C., contributed to this story.
– A tunnel collapse was discovered at the Hanford nuclear site Tuesday, months after experts called the Washington state facility "the most toxic place in America" and a "Chernobyl waiting to happen." Some 4,800 workers at the site were told to shelter indoors Tuesday morning after crews discovered the roof of a tunnel housing rail cars filled with radioactive waste had caved in, the Seattle Times reports. Nonessential workers out of a workforce of more than 9,000 were later told to go home early. Emergency officials told flights not to pass over the 580-square-mile Columbia River site, which produced plutonium for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons during the Cold War. By Tuesday evening the incident was "moving from the emergency phase towards the recovery phase," with no workers injured or any sign of a release of radiation, the Department of Energy said. It's not clear, however, how the facility plans to deal with the 400-square-foot hole in the tunnel roof, reports the Spokesman-Review. "Sometimes you run into unexpected situations like this and our employees are figuring out a path forward to deal with it," an Emergency Operation Center spokesman says. The AP reports that the collapse has added to calls for improved worker safety at the site, which is undergoing a 50-year, $110 billion cleanup not expected to finish until 2060.