Americans Deserve Results Well Before Next Ice Age

Beginning in 1984 as a small group of concerned citizens, the Hanford Education Action League sought to bring democratic and scientific accountability to the federal nuclear reservation at Hanford.

Using research and public challenge, HEAL volunteers and staff members were instrumental in exposing lethal and frequently concealed health and environmental hazards resulting from Hanford’s massive radiation releases into the Inland Empire’s air, water and soil.

Sequential stunning revelations led to:

Hanford being recognized as unsuitable as a repository for high-level nuclear waste.

Acknowledgment that Hanford radiation had had a morbid impact on downwind citizens.

Closure of the Chernobyl-like nuclear reactor.

Cessation of plutonium production at the PUREX plant.

Recognition that, as the most radiologically contaminated site in the United States, cleanup of a mountain of nuclear waste was a critically urgent priority.

Today, those of us who have shared HEAL’s concerns from its early days can take some modest satisfaction in having had a substantial impact on the earlier developments. We are not, however, pleased with current progress in the cleanup.

Today, at an annual cost of more than $1 billion, most of the cleanup still remains to be done and work is at a standstill. In some respects, the waste problem has gotten worse.

The 177 underground tanks filled with a witch’s brew of largely uncharacteristic chemical and high-level nuclear wastes continue to leak into the ground and to require constant monitoring, lest some of them become overheated or catastrophically explosive. Cleanup proposals and agreements come and go with little or nothing actually happening.

Exotic waste-storage technologies, including immobilization of radioactive waste in grout (concrete) and glass (vitrification), have sucked up hundreds of millions of public dollars. Yet, no significant amount of high-level waste has been safely stored, even temporarily.

In some ways, the threats increase as ever more radioactive waste is brought to Hanford. They intensify as proposals for turning the Fast Flux Test Facility (a hazardous experimental breeder reactor) into a tritium producer are debated. (Tritium is a hydrogen isotope that boosts the explosive punch of nuclear weapons.)

During early decades of Hanford’s operation, the facility’s downwind neighbors suffered secret but lethal radiation exposures. Pious, belated federal promises to do right by these people remain mired in studies, controversy and indecision.

Technically and economically, Hanford is nearly as great a health and environmental threat as it ever was. But today’s threats don’t mobilize media and public concern the way radiation going up the PUREX stack or a feared meltdown of the reactor used to.

Worse, as the nation worries about high taxes and deficits, there is a mounting likelihood that a parsimonious Congress will drastically curtail or even eliminate cleanup appropriations. Should that happen, Hanford and a half dozen other radioactively contaminated reservations around the nation could become permanent national sacrifice zones - deadly perils to the next 1,000 generations.

The tragic irony is that Hanford cleanup does not have to be in the deplorable state that it is.

Recently, HEAL researcher Todd Martin returned from Britain, where he visited Sellafield, a nuclear fuel reprocessing facility that has had nearly as long and lurid a history as Hanford. Recently, however, Sellafield has made heartening cleanup progress.

As an invited guest, Martin had a three-day opportunity to see personally that British scientists and engineers have been, for up to 10 years, safely treating and immobilizing the same sort of nuclear waste as exists at Hanford.

Whereas Hanford technologists spend around $400 million trying to develop a poorly conceived grout for immobilizing nuclear waste, their Sellafield counterparts routinely are producing drums of intermediate-level waste grout that meet strict standards of safety and durability. Whereas Hanford currently has no working vitrification procedure for its high-level waste, the Sellafield folks have been doing that on an assembly-line basis since February 1991.

The one nuclear waste problem the British have not solved is how to permanently store immobilized waste. Neither has the United States. However, Sellafield grout and glass drums are kept in monitored, retrievable facilities where they can be watched, recovered as necessary and moved into a permanent facility when one becomes available.

HEAL knows the U.S. Department of Energy and its contractors are aware of Sellafield’s success. Our question is: Why haven’t U.S. nuclear waste technologists and policy-makers been benefiting more directly from what the British are doing daily and safely?

As HEAL’s Martin discovered, the Sellafield operators are open, efficient and willing to share technical information.

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