Hanford Cleanup Effort Reaches First Milestone Most Of Site’s Hazardous Liquid Waste Discharges Are Stopped Or Reduced

The Hanford Nuclear Reservation met the first of its major cleanup milestones just before Friday’s deadline by stopping the site’s most hazardous liquid waste discharges and significantly reducing others.

“This is a very important start,” said Doug Sherwood, Hanford project manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. “The first thing you have to do when you’re cleaning up (a site) is make sure you’re not making things worse.”

Hanford for more than 40 years created plutonium for nuclear weapons. Now the site has the nation’s greatest volume of nuclear waste. Cleanup costs have been estimated at more than $50 billion over 30 years. Plutonium production has stopped, but many of the production plants are still functional and produce liquid waste from cooling and other operations.

The original agreement among the EPA, the U.S. Energy Department and the state Department of Ecology, signed in 1989, didn’t mention the streams of liquid waste. But environmentalists protested and, in 1992, the three agencies pledged to stop the major flows.

“It’s really the first time the public has made a huge outcry on an issue and seen results,” Sherwood said. “In this case, we’ve actually followed through and completed the project.”

Some smaller streams still exist, however, said Melodie Selby, who supervised the Ecology Department’s part of the project.

Part of the problem was that the Hanford site was chosen for the great amounts of water available from the Columbia River, Selby said. Plants were designed with “once-through cooling,” which meant water was taken from the river, then dumped back in with contaminants after being used for things like cooling spent nuclear fuel.

“You couldn’t just turn off the discharge because of safety issues,” she said.

“Spent fuel improperly cooled can create a self-sustaining reaction and can reach criticality very quickly,” said DOE spokesman Terry Brown.

The liquid waste project cost about $325 million over six years, said Tony DiLiberto, manager of liquid effluent services at Westinghouse Hanford Co.

“Generally, we are happy. This is one of the real success stories of the Tri-Party Agreement,” said Todd Martin of the Spokane-based Hanford Education Action League.

That’s important right now as Congress considers pre-empting the Tri-Party Agreement in an effort to cut costs at Hanford and force the cleanup to be done more efficiently.