U.S. Considered Building Lake For Hanford Waste

The U.S. government considered building a lake to store contaminated waste-water at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, but decided direct release into the Columbia River was safer and cheaper, newly declassified documents show.

The Atomic Energy Commission’s 1962 report, “River Contamination Reduction Studies,” is among 270,000 pages of previously classified materials about Hanford that the Energy Department released and made available Monday on the Internet.

The documents detailing the origin of the Manhattan Project and the secrecy of plutonium production include a 1953 report about “higher than anticipated radioactive contamination occurring off the Hanford site” at Richland.

Another 1954 document used in preparation for a news conference about potential dangers shows federal officials knew more than they let on at the time about the extent and nature of contamination.

“Language used in the questions and answers reflects the attitude of that era that radioactive contamination of this sort was not of major concern,” DOE said in a summary of the documents on Monday.

Energy Secretary Federico Pena said the release of the 270,000 pages nearly doubles the declassified materials available to the public on the Internet. He announced the move as part of the Clinton administration’s evolving policy of openness.

The study of river contamination provided a cost-versus-benefit analysis of developing an artificial lake to hold contaminated wastewater from the nuclear reactors.

It concluded a lake was “unjustified because of reduced costs and reduced decontamination efforts for the direct release option,” DOE said.

“Our friends in the Soviet Union built a lake,” Roger Heusser, deputy director of the DOE’s Office of Declassification, said Monday.

“All I can say is I’m damn glad we didn’t,” he told reporters.

Russian leaders have raised concerns in recent years that manmade ponds full of liquid radioactive waste at a Ural Mountains nuclear plant are in danger of overflowing and could contaminate large inhabited areas.

The idea of a proposed lake at Hanford was scuttled after the report raised concerns on a number of fronts, from the impact on waterfowl landing in the lake to evaporation of the thermal hot surfaces producing considerable fog.