The federal government has finally relented in its dispute with Washington over Hanford cleanup deadlines. Now if only the feds had a plan for where to send the site’s high-level radioactive waste.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced the new agreement Tuesday during his first visit to the Hanford nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington. In exchange for getting more time to treat some of the site’s nastiest wastes, the Justice Department conceded its fight to undercut the state’s enforcement power.

Washington ends up with what it wanted all along – plus a nice extra. Its tentative deal with the federal government sets a new cleanup schedule based in reality, gives a court the ability to hold the feds accountable and provides an extension of the moratorium against importing most kinds of radioactive wastes to Hanford.

Under the new deadlines, the Department of Energy would get two more decades to empty leak-prone tanks and to treat the radioactive wastes they contain.

The new timeline – which reflects setbacks caused by the complexity and scale of the task as well as human error – would actually be progress. Just last year, state officials were concerned that Hanford’s worst problem, its tank wastes, would be around until 2150. The proposed agreement gets the job done a century sooner.

But once the tanks are emptied and the wastes “vitrified” into glasslike logs, where will those logs go for underground storage?

Our guess is apparently as good as the federal government’s. Chu has announced that Nevada’s Yucca Mountain – chosen by Congress in 1987 as the most promising site for permanent storage of the nation’s radioactive wastes – is no longer an option.

A commission is to recommend sites, provided they don’t include any in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s state.

Scientists have been studying Yucca since 1983 and have found nothing to rule it out. Now, the Obama administration wants to restart the process.

At Hanford, the federal government could end up meeting its timeline, but ultimately reneging on the underlying promise of a thorough cleanup. Hanford’s vitrification plant is expected to produce its first log by 2020. It’s looking quite possible that those spiffed-up tank wastes will have no place to go.