The following editorial appeared last Wednesday in the Yakima Herald-Republic.

If you’re looking for something to keep you awake nights, there are two facilities within a couple of hours of Yakima that might be on the top of your anxiety list.

First, consider the Hanford vitrification plant, some 40 miles east of Yakima. The “vit plant” is designed, eventually, to turn high-level nuclear waste into a black glasslike substance.

Construction started four years ago and – like almost everything else about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation – now finds itself over budget, behind schedule and mired in continuing controversy.

Then consider the Umatilla Chemical Depot, roughly 110 miles southeast of Yakima and due south of Hanford, just three miles south of the Columbia River. Since the early 1960s, the depot has been a burial ground of sorts for some of this country’s nastiest chemical weapons, including sarin-filled rockets and mustard gas munitions. At one time, the depot was home to about 12 percent of the nation’s poison gas stockpile.

But construction of an incinerator at the Umatilla site was completed two years ago, and this month the last of 91,000 sarin-filled M55 rockets were destroyed.

While that was a significant mark in the project’s progress, there is still a huge number of chemical agents to destroy – something like six million pounds of rockets, warheads, bombs and mines filled with assorted nerve gases.

The United States is under treaty obligations to have all the weapons at the Umatilla Depot destroyed by 2012. Officials there say the work may actually be done up to a year earlier, with a total price tag of about $2.4 billion.

That means the cost of destroying a total of 7.4 million pounds of poisonous chemicals in bombs, artillery shells and other weapons will be roughly one-fifth of the $11.3 billion now estimated as a price tag on the not-yet-operational vit plant at Hanford.

We would join with residents from throughout the broad Columbia Basin area in celebrating the beginning of the end of the Umatilla Chemical Depot and the danger it has posed throughout northeastern Oregon and southeastern and southcentral Washington for decades. The incinerator near the town of Irrigon, Ore., has not operated perfectly by any means, but it has operated – and tens of thousands of deadly and decaying poison gas-filled rockets will no longer pose a threat.

Now, incineration of the remaining outdated and dangerous weaponry will continue until the 1,000 storage “bunkers” that used to stretch north of Interstate 84 will all be empty.

Meanwhile, back at Hanford? Costs mount. Scientists, environmentalists, politicians and bureaucrats bicker and stall. The threat remains. The original proposal that called for vitrification as the best solution to high-level nuclear waste is now 25 years old, and some 53 million gallons of radioactive garbage is still lurking in underground tanks at Hanford. The current best guess for start-up of the vit plant is July 2018.

It’s enough to keep you awake at night.