Document Search Halts Hanford Work

Cleanup work halted this week at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation as workers search musty files, computers and defunct plutonium factories for documents about Hanford’s past.

The historic files will be reviewed by lawyers for Hanford downwinders in lawsuits against the companies that ran Hanford during the Cold War.

U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald of Yakima ordered the search.

His Feb. 8 order also covers Hanford-related documents at other sites throughout the government’s immense, nationwide weapons complex.

The search is part of the discovery process in lawsuits filed by thousands of people who say their health was damaged by Hanford radiation emissions.

The court’s deadline to deliver the documents is Friday.

“We’re going to make it,” said U.S. Department of Energy spokesman Terry Brown on Wednesday.

The massive search is thought to be the first in Hanford’s history where all 13,400 workers drop their normal work to concentrate on a single task, Brown said.

It’s expected to produce a list of every place documents are stored on the 560-square-mile site, plus indexes of papers concerning airborne releases from 50 years of Hanford operations.

“They want to know, ‘What do you have out there, where is it, and how do we get to it?,”’ Brown said. “It means a walk-through of every room, every space, every building - even unoccupied ones.”

Workers are complying, but some are uneasy about how thorough it will be.

Sonja Anderson, a senior Hanford scientist, said she has witnessed and reported the destruction of classified documents at Hanford since 1991.

“We’ve not been honest about our true operations at Hanford over the past 50 years,” she said.

Anderson has listed more than 50 boxes of documents for the judge’s order, including details of reactor accidents and radiation releases she says have never been disclosed to the public.

The search is expected to temporarily affect some cleanup work, said John Wagoner, the Energy Department’s Richland operations manager.

Responding to the court’s order “will require a huge effort, but we will not in any way compromise safety,” Wagoner said in a news release.

Costs of the search will come from Hanford’s $1.3 billion cleanup budget, he said. More than 90 percent of that money goes to clean up radioactive and chemical wastes from Cold War plutonium production.

Starting in 1990, the plaintiffs, known as Hanford downwinders, began filing lawsuits against several former private contractors that ran Hanford for the government.

Their lawyers want the documents to help them prove Hanford’s Cold War operations damaged downwinders’ health. Some of the documents remain classified.

“We’re looking for operations documents and those that deal with various processes that released radiation,” said Roy Haber, a Eugene, Ore., attorney representing about 650 of the 3,000 downwinders.

“We’ve learned there are historic documents at facilities that have never been identified or put in any data bases. They are in areas where a lot of work was done that we are interested in,” Haber said.

“It’s a fair assumption that they’re out in these boxes that have a lot of dust on them.”

Judge McDonald’s order sets out a procedure for declassifying the documents, or having people with security clearances study them, Brown said.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: BYLINE = Karen Dorn Steele Staff writer The Associated Press contributed to this report.