It is tempting, for those of us some 200 miles downstream, to regard the Hanford Nuclear Reservation as an afterthought. Out of sight, out of mind, after all.
But with the nation’s most contaminated site containing 56 million gallons of radioactive waste left over from decades of plutonium production, and with many of the tanks that are holding that waste being known to leak, it is prudent to occasionally check in on the cleanup efforts. Residents of both Washington and Oregon — as well as the ecology of the Columbia River — face a potential threat by what happens at Hanford, and for decades the federal government has not provided the attention that is warranted by that threat.
All of which brings us to a couple recent headlines. In one, it was noted last week that workers at Hanford have demolished the location of one of the nation’s most infamous radioactive accidents. In 1976, Hanford worker Harold McCluskey survived an explosion that showered him with glass and radioactive material. McCluskey was exposed to 500 times the occupational standard for americium-241, and his level of radioactivity was such that he was placed in isolation for five months. He died 11 years later of coronary artery disease that was unrelated to the accident, but he went down in history as the Atomic Man.
Workers recently demolished the McCluskey Room at Hanford, the first of four main buildings that made up the Plutonium Finishing Plant to be torn down. In the context of what needs to be done at Hanford, this is relatively insignificant. But it does provide the opportunity to tell the fascinating story of Harold McCluskey, and it does indicate that some incremental progress is being made.
More important is the lingering issue of radioactive waste at a site that is about half the size of Rhode Island. Last week, workers installed an exhaust system nearly 30 feet tall and 6 feet in diameter, weighing 19 tons, that will scrub emissions at a low activity waste facility. It is part of a plan for a vitrification plant that will turn the radioactive waste into a benign glasslike substance. The project is decades behind schedule, a fact that has led the state of Washington to file suit against the federal government and procure a consent decree that has largely been ignored. Installation of the exhaust system provides hope that the vitrification system will be up and running by 2022.
Throughout the process, the federal government has been slow to live up to its duty of protecting the residents of two states and a significant waterway. Most profound in this dereliction of duty is a failure to establish a national nuclear repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada. Congress approved the facility in the 1980s and Ronald Reagan signed it into law, but in recent years Congress — particularly the Senate under the leadership of Harry Reid, D-Nev. — has declined to move the project forward.
Reid is now retired, providing hope that Congress can place its moral duty of cleaning up Hanford ahead of hometown politics. The United States has more than 120 facilities storing some 70,000 tons of radioactive waste, and establishing a single, remote repository would make more sense than endangering citizens throughout the country.
With Washington serving as the home to the most contaminated of these sites, and with that site sitting along the Columbia River, this should be of particular importance to communities downstream from Hanford. Even if the nuclear reservation is often an afterthought.
