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Introduction The Hanford Nuclear Reservation is the largest nuclear waste dump in the Western Hemisphere and a major Northwest environmental issue. It is a serious long-term threat to the Columbia River, which Oregon depends on for power generation, farm irrigation, fishing, transport and recreation. (more) Mission Our mission is to educate the public on Hanford cleanup issues, and work to increase public participation in the Hanford decision making process. Contact us Hanford discussion email list
A Dimly Burning
Wick |
For news updates, please see our Facebook page at: PLUME The poems in PLUME are nuclear-age songs of innocence and experience set in the "empty" desert west. Award-winning poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland, Washington, at the height of the Cold War, next door to the Hanford Site where "every father I knew disappeared to fuel the bomb" and worked at Hanford herself for three years as an engineer. By the late 1980s, declassified documents revealed decades of environmental contamination and deception at the plutonium production facility, contra-dicting a lifetime of official assurances to workers and their families that their community was and always had been safe. At the same time, her childhood friend Carolyn's own father was dying of radiation-induced illness: "blood cells began to err one moment efficient the next / a few gone wrong stunned by exposure to radiation / as [he] milled uranium into slugs or swabbed down / train cars or reported to B Reactor for a quick run-in / run-out..." Plume, written twenty years later, traces this American betrayal, and explores the human capacity to hold truth at bay when it threatens one's fundamental identity. Flenniken observes her own resistance to facts: "one box contains my childhood / the other contains his death / if one is true / how can the other be true?" The book's personal story and its historical one converge gradually and subtly with enriching interplay and wide technical variety, introducing characters that range from Carolyn and her father to Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and Manhattan Project health physicist Herbert Parker. As a child of "Atomic City," Kathleen Flenniken brings to this tragedy the knowing perspective of an insider coupled with the art of a precise, unflinching, gifted poet. Kathleen Flenniken came to poetry late, after working as a civil engineer and hydrologist at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Her first book FAMOUS won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, was named a Notable Book by the American Library Association, and was a Washington State Book Award finalist. She teaches poetry and is a co-editor and president of Floating Bridge Press. She lives in Seattle, Washington. "Moving deftly between haunting lyric and disturbing documentary, Kathleen Flenniken packages recent history in a wide variety of poetic forms and styles. Set at the Hanford plutonium production site, where the poet grew up and about which she has done impressive research, Flenniken's Plume raises the bar for documentary poetry, moving us with its timely and important subject matter as well as the meticulous craft of its poems." --Martha Collins, Author of Blue Front and White Papers "The beautifully wrought poems in Plume are as well-tuned morally as they are musically. And their lamentations are epic: hubris and its disastrous consequences, love and betrayal, human folly, human fragility. . . . Plume is an enormously important and moving work of art."-Sharon Bryan, author of Sharp Stars
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We Need Accountability at Hanford
http://www.hanfordchallenge.org Protect Hanford Whistleblowers Dear Senator, The Hanford nuclear site in Eastern Washington is the nation’s most contaminated toxic waste dump. The government is building a plant to deal with Hanford’s massive inventory of highly radioactive nuclear waste, called the Waste Treatment Plant, to convert radioactive waste into glass logs, for ultimate disposal in a deep geological repository. The Waste Treatment Plant is an important facility, but it is more important that it be a safe and effective plant. I am concerned that numerous technical experts who work at the site, including the Manager for Environmental and Nuclear Safety and five other top engineers, have gone on record with their concerns that the safety problems in the design are being ignored and suppressed. Worse, several government agency investigations reveal a atmosphere of reprisal against those employees who raise safety concerns. We need to learn from past preventable disasters, including the Space Shuttle Challenge and the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns that it doesn’t pay to ignore the technical experts. While the national media has reported on this issue at length, Congress has said practically nothing about it. In response to the news that the schedule for the plant’s opening date might slip, several Washington State political figures expressed dismay at the schedule slippage, but said nothing about safety! Please support the rights of engineers, scientists and other workers
at Hanford to voice their concerns without fear of reprisal. I urge
you to hold hearings to look into DOE and contractor mismanagement
at the Waste Treatment Plant. We need a solid plan to put the plant
on the right path, and that can only happen with strong protections
for conscientious workers. As a taxpayer and regional neighbor of Hanford, I would like to hear back from you about what you are doing to protect our investment and our future. We cannot afford another radioactive white elephant in the desert in eastern Washington. Sincerely, |
Please
join us in asking Washington Senators Cantwell and Murray to stand
up for whistleblower protections and independent oversight at Hanford’s
Waste Treatment Plant by sending the postcard below.