After seven months of delays, construction will begin again on a waste-treatment plant located at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.

The plant on Washington state's Hanford nuclear reservation is estimated to cost $12.3 billion. The plant is 85 percent complete, and construction is more than halfway finished.

The Department of Energy halted construction months ago amid concerns about the plant's eventual safe operation and technical issues.

DOE is considering whether to feed waste into one of two parts of the facility depending on radioactivity rather than feed it into a pretreatment facility.

The plant would convert millions of gallons of radioactive waste into glasslike logs for storage. Currently, the site's waste is stored in underground tanks that have leaked into groundwater (Shannon Dininny, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Jan. 15). -- MM