When the cleanup of nuclear waste on the Hanford Reservation was just underway in the 1980’s, the mayor pro tempore of Richland huffed that Hanford’s workforce was not meant to be “janitors.” The nuclear reservation had a radioactivity problem but also an attitude problem.
Twenty-four billion dollars later, the vitrification plant, entitled the Low Activity Work Facility—Hanford is full of such wordy titles — is at last beginning to process liquid waste from the nation’s largest concentration of hot stuff. The Hanford tank “farm” holds 56 million gallons of the byproduct of 40 years of making plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal.
The original schedule called for low level waste treatment to begin in 2007 with high level waste vitrification to begin in 2011. The high-level processing is now slated to get underway in2033.
Hanford produced 67 tons of plutonium in its lifetime creating instruments of death. The plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb came from the Eastern Washington sector of the Manhattan Project. The residue was hastily put in 177 storage tanks, at least 20 of which have leaked.
“After decades of design, engineering and construction, Hanford workers are finally beginning to immobilize millions of gallons of toxic waste into glass: This is an incredible technological and logical accomplishment. . .,” Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said in a statement. The vitrification plant began operations just under the wire of an October 15th judicial order.
It is also a political accomplishment. In 1989, a hard-eyed Department of Ecology director, one Christine Gregoire, negotiated a state-and-federal cleanup accord with federal Office of Management and Budget director Richard Darman. The agreement has withstood numerous attempts by the U.S. Department of Energy to welch on it.
The joking description of the Hanford Reservation has long been that it is 560 square miles of kitty litter. But it borders on the Columbia River, master stream of the Northwest. The prospect of radioactive waste reaching the river spurred the cleanup.
The Hanford Reach of the mighty Columbia is the only non-reservoirized stretch of river between Bonneville Dam and the Canadian border. It is spawning habitat for the fall chinook salmon run, the only large large wild salmon population left in the river.
The Hanford Reach was made a national monument by President Clinton, a cause championed by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash. It was also a project of U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Dedicating the Monument in 2000, Vice President Al Gore was taken out on the jet boat of retired Hanford worker Richard Steele. Steele loved to reach the edge of the “lake” created by McNary Dam, where the current picks up, spreading his arms and saying, “Now, THIS is a river.”
Defensiveness has been a feature of the Tri Cities nuclear establishment. A rote explanation was trotted out in answer to critics. You could absorb more radioactivity in the act of love, or on a cross-country airplane flight, or skiing in Colorado, than working at Hanford.
Truth be told, however, the Reagan Administration halted plutonium production soon after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union. As with the Soviet reactors, the Hanford N reactor — dedicated in 1963 by President Kennedy— was built around a graphite core with no containment dome. A panel of retired physicists, the Roddis Commission, came away appalled at reactor operations and spurred the shutdown.
Still, problems were covered up in desert soil. A radiation leak took place, just before a 2013 Reservation visit by Gov. Jay Inslee. Warning signs along the governor’s route were taken down. Hanford’s heritage was celebrated. The old reactor that produced plutonium used in the Nagasaki bomb has been made a unit of the Manhattan Project National Historical Park.
Three thousand workers labored on the cleanup, which is far from complete. The prospect of cheating remains alive and well. The Project 2025 agenda, developed by the Heritage Foundation— the foundation for the Trump II regime — hinted broadly at a means of walking away. Instead of turning high level waste into glass, just reclassify the stuff and declare the cleanup complete.
The lawyering is not yet done, but Washington now has a lawyer-governor who as Attorney General successfully took the Department of Energy to court. Bob Ferguson is invested in the cleanup, declaring: “Transforming this waste into glass offers the best protection for the environment and communities across the Pacific Northwest.”
Even if the high level cleanup keeps to its latest schedule, and the sludge is removed from all those 177 waste tanks, the bomb factory and its aftershocks will have a lifespan of 90 years.
Hot stuff, indeed. Of course, nuclear industry apologists will continue to argue that elevated cancer levels downwind from Hanford have nothing to do with its deadly product.
It provides a measure of reassurance to those who shop at Atomic Foods in Pasco, root for the Columbia High School Bombers basketball team — beneath their trademark mushroom cloud .— and drive to work down Leslie Groves Boulevard
The culture of plutonium production was summed up, some years back, on a sign above the Hanford House hotel: “A little nukie never hurt anyone.”
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