In our view Nov. 30: Clean Up Hanford

When one form of government sues another, it annoys all constituents. Those governments are supposed to serve us, not fight each other.

So it is troubling that the state of Washington last week sued the federal government to expedite cleanup of the Hanford nuclear reservation near the Tri-Cities. But it’s not so troubling as to keep us from praising Gov. Chris Gregoire and Attorney General Rob McKenna for doing so. Our state has tried for years to get the feds to meet their obligation to clean up nuclear waste that already contaminates the aquifer and is moving toward the Columbia River.

Here are six questions that serve as a primer on this issue:

1. Why should Clark County residents care about the Hanford nuclear reservation that’s 200 miles away? Because we — and more than a million other people in four dozen communities — live downstream from Hanford.

2. Really, though, how serious is this problem? Hanford contains 177 underground tanks that hold 53 million gallons of highly radioactive material; 149 tanks are single-wall; 67 tanks have confirmed leaks, which have formed several toxic plumes that are moving toward the Columbia River.

3. Why is this cleanup the federal government’s responsibility? Because it is a federal plant, begun in the 1940s to help build the atomic bomb. Hanford helped America win wars and strengthened the cause for global peace.

4. But hasn’t the federal government been trying to clean up Hanford? Not very diligently, in recent years. Washington state and the federal Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency signed the Tri-Party Agreement in 1989, setting cleanup priorities and deadlines that have been broken and extended many times.

The Bush administration has been especially negligent. According to the state Department of Ecology, Bush’s proposed 2009 federal budget falls $600 million short of what the federal government’s own Energy Department says is needed at Hanford. That budget includes the cleanup of just one of the tanks at Hanford. State officials complain that the current administration has boosted funding for nuclear weaponry, nuclear energy and nuclear science, yet has cut by $800 million nuclear cleanup projects at Hanford and other sites in 14 states.

5. Shouldn’t state and federal officials simply try harder to reach an agreement, rather than taking this to court? That’s the approach recommended by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Pasco, according to an editorial in The Seattle Times. And that editorial urged state and federal officials to follow such a strategy.

But Gregoire and McKenna clearly and understandably have run out of patience and see no solution other than a legal battle. The state has agreed to more than 400 changes to the 1989 agreement. “It’s not that we haven’t been flexible,” McKenna said, but the feds’ intransigence “left us with a lack of confidence that we could trust them to meet the newest milestones when they haven’t met the last milestones.”

6. Is this massive cleanup even achievable?

Yes, at a projected cost of about $60 billion and lasting until 2035, according to the 1989 agreement. But both the funding and the deadline have fallen so far behind in recent years, it’s hard to see any reachable goal now.

Still, there is no other choice. Both state and federal officials agree on that. It’s time to stop passing this contaminated buck. If the lawsuit jolts the feds toward meaningful progress, and if the Barack Obama administration moves toward renewing a decades-long commitment, then the toxic tide that threatens those million-plus downstream residents perhaps could be stemmed.