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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
Web links A Dimly Burning
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Nuclear cleanup regulation could put public
at risk
In both cases, the not-so surprising news was that the mine and the oil rig had abysmal records of safety violations before the explosions yet were still allowed to operate by the captive regulatory agencies. Where is the government accountability? It is the government's job to assure that ultra-hazardous industries operate safely and responsibly. Is nuclear next? The Department of Energy sits on the nation's biggest nuclear nightmare. Its inventories of highly radioactive and toxic wastes defy comprehension. Washingtonians are familiar with the DOE's No. 1 accomplishment, the Hanford nuclear site, which holds the lion's share of the nation's radioactive detritus. Suffice it to say that the escape of even a small fraction of such material into the environment would constitute a Chernobyl-sized catastrophe. Last year, President Obama appointed scientist Steven Chu to head the Energy Department. Chu brought with him an apparent disdain for regulation, and a firm belief that the pesky agency overseers just get in the way of the real work. That, at least, seems to be the sentiment behind the issuance of a memorandum in March that announced the reorganization of DOE's safety oversight function. Authored by the deputy secretary of Energy, the March 16 memo sounds all the themes and code words that precede dangerous scale-back of the regulatory function such as contractors being free to implement safety programs "in light of their situation without excessive Federal oversight or overly prescriptive departmental requirements." Regulatory actions are to happen only at the "lowest appropriate level of contractor and Federal management." The shift to self-regulation by the same contractors who stand to be penalized for wrongdoing is the standard recipe for unhappy surprises like coal mine explosions and the oil spill. The Energy Department's memo follows a 2004 agency reorganization that abolished the health oversight office — a move protested by Govs. Chris Gregoire and Bill Richardson of New Mexico. The functions in that office were transferred to the Health, Safety and Security Administration (HSSA), run by a civil servant with no political power. This leads to the question of what we can expect next, now that we have had a financial meltdown, a coal mine disaster, and an oil drilling explosion, all within the last two years. A nuclear disaster at a cleanup site like Hanford is to be avoided at all costs. The persistence of radioactivity in the environment for thousands of years makes large areas of land uninhabitable, and wreaks an ongoing and incalculable human health toll. Prevention, rather than reaction, to such tragedies should be driving law and policy. Congress and the Obama Administration had better get their priorities straight and realize that the cost of rigorous and effective oversight — which must include robust legal protections and incentives for whistleblowers — is a lot cheaper than trying to clean up after the catastrophe. For the Energy Department, that means reestablishing the Office of Environment, Safety and Health, beefing up the safety inspection function and centralizing responsibility for inspection and enforcement in a robust and independent agency with the resources and capacity necessary to protect the public and workers. The wake-up call is here. We should act.
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Analysis triples U.S. plutonium waste
figures
WASHINGTON — The amount of plutonium buried at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State is nearly three times what the federal government previously reported, a new analysis indicates, suggesting that a cleanup to protect future generations will be far more challenging than planners had assumed. Plutonium waste is much more prevalent around nuclear weapons sites nationwide than the Energy Department’s official accounting indicates, said Robert Alvarez, a former department official who in recent months reanalyzed studies conducted by the department in the last 15 years for Hanford; the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory; the Savannah River Site, near Aiken, S.C.; and elsewhere. But the problem is most severe at Hanford, a 560-square-mile tract in south-central Washington that was taken over by the federal government as part of the Manhattan Project. By the time production stopped in the 1980s, Hanford had made most of the nation’s plutonium. The plutonium does not pose a major radiation hazard now, largely because it is under “institutional controls” like guards, weapons and gates. But government scientists say that even in minute particles, plutonium can cause cancer, and because it takes 24,000 years to lose half its radioactivity, it is certain to last longer than the controls. The fear is that in a few hundred years, the plutonium could reach an underground area called the saturated zone, where water flows, and from there enter the Columbia River. Because the area is now arid, contaminants move extremely slowly, but over the millennia the climate is expected to change, experts say. The finding on the extent of plutonium waste signals that the cleanup, still in its early stages, will be more complex, perhaps requiring technologies that do not yet exist. But more than 20 years after the Energy Department vowed to embark on a cleanup, it still has not “characterized,” or determined the exact nature of, the contaminated soil. The department has been weighing whether to try to clean up 90 percent, 99 percent or 99.9 percent of the waste, but because the extent of contamination is unclear, so is the relative cost of the options. For now, the preferred option is 99 percent. Government officials recognize that they still have a weak grasp of how much plutonium is contaminating the environment. “The numbers are changing,” said Ron Skinnerland, a radiation expert at the Washington State Department of Ecology, which is trying to enforce an agreement it reached with the Energy Department in 1989 for the federal government to clean up Hanford. So far, the cleanup, which began in the 1990s, has involved moving some contaminated material near the banks of the Columbia to drier locations. (In fact, the Energy Department’s cleanup office is called the Office of River Protection.) The office has begun building a factory that would take the most highly radioactive liquids and sludges from decaying storage tanks and solidify them in glass. That would not make them any less radioactive, but it would increase the likelihood that they stay put for the next few thousand years. In 1996, the department released an official inventory of plutonium production and disposal. But Mr. Alvarez analyzed later Energy Department reports and concluded that there was substantially more plutonium in waste tanks and in the environment. The biggest issue is the amount of plutonium that has leaked from the tanks, was intentionally dumped in the dirt or was pumped into the ground. Mr. Skinnerland said much of the waste was 90 or 100 feet underground, too deep to dig out. Some contaminants can be pumped out, but that does not work well for materials that contain low concentrations of plutonium. The Energy Department has researched the possibility of shooting electric currents through the soil to create glasslike materials that would lock up contaminants, but it has not analyzed whether the technique would work at those depths. Inés R. Triay, the assistant secretary of energy for environmental management, did not dispute Mr. Alvarez’s new analysis of department figures. She said that decisions on the long-term cleanup would rely not on the 1996 inventory but on a systematic sampling of the waste, which she said had yet to begin. Mr. Alvarez’s report has been accepted for publication later this year by Science and Global Security, a peer-reviewed journal published by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Another problem raised by the inaccuracies in the 1996 figures is that they could complicate the negotiation of new agreements with Russia or other countries about destroying bomb fuel, said Frank N. von Hippel, a professor of public and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School and a co-chairman of the journal’s board of editors. Gerry Pollet, executive director of the environmental group Hearth of America Northwest, said the government should embrace a cleanup plan that assures that even thousands of years into the future, an unsuspecting public will not be overexposed. “What is reasonably foreseeable is that there are people who will be drinking the water in the ground at Hanford at some point in the next few hundred years,” Mr. Pollet said. “We’re going to be killing people, pure and simple.” Plutonium was first manufactured in World War II for use in bombs. (The one that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945 originated with plutonium made at Hanford.) For decades, the government produced it in military reactors by bombarding a natural element, uranium, with subatomic particles called neutrons, converting uranium to plutonium, and then using chemical processes to harvest the plutonium. The new analysis indicates that the chemical separation process was not nearly as efficient as the government claimed and that a lot of the plutonium was left behind in various stages. It also suggests that estimates of plutonium production by the Energy Department and its predecessors, including the Atomic Energy Commission and the Manhattan Project, were not nearly as accurate as scientists and bureaucrats said they were. Releasing declassified figures in 1996, the Department of Energy said that 111,400 kilograms (about 123 tons) of plutonium had been produced at Hanford or taken there from civilian reactors or foreign sources. Of that, 12,000 kilograms were “removed,” the department said. Some of that plutonium was consumed in weapons tests or in bomb attacks like the one on Nagasaki, but 3,919 kilograms of plutonium were stored as waste at Hanford, it reported. However, Mr. Alvarez’s analysis, based entirely on Energy Department documents, shows that the amount discarded as waste was actually 11,655 kilograms, nearly three times as much, and that the total inventory of plutonium produced and acquired was closer to 120,000 kilograms, not 111,400. Mr. Alvarez’s estimate indicates that enough plutonium is buried at Hanford to create 1,800 Nagasaki-size bombs, he said, but he played down any possibility of a weapons threat. “I don’t think anybody stole anything,” he said. |
Millions
of gallons of oil gush continue to rush unabated from BP's mile-deep
well in the Gulf of Mexico, and 11 workers are dead from the massive
explosion that caused the biggest oil spill in decades. Weeks before
this event, the news was dominated by the preventable explosion
that killed 29 West Virginia coal miners.