State to sue over waste-dump plan

Washington state will go to federal court next week in an effort to block a Bush administration plan to import large quantities of additional nuclear waste to Hanford – already the nation’s most-contaminated nuclear weapons site.

The U.S. Department of Energy import plan could double the nuclear trash at Hanford.

Gov. Gary Locke and Attorney General Christine Gregoire said Friday they’ll ask U.S. District Judge Alan McDonald for permission to expand their existing lawsuit challenging the Energy Department’s plans. The current lawsuit only addresses extremely long-lived “transuranic” waste that contains plutonium and other radioactive elements beyond uranium on the periodic table. Plutonium, a highly toxic element, retains half its radioactivity for 24,000 years.

State officials fear the additional waste imports will worsen serious, widespread nuclear contamination at Hanford, including tainted groundwater moving toward the Columbia River.

“DOE has failed to prove that shipping more waste to Hanford won’t make the nation’s most contaminated site even worse,” Gregoire said Friday.

Her legal team has already obtained an injunction from Judge McDonald halting further shipments of transuranic waste to Hanford. But on June 23, the Energy Department upped the ante.

The agency said in a record of decision it would now begin to import two other categories of radioactive trash, low-level radioactive and “mixed” low-level waste. Under the new plan, up to 219,663 cubic meters of low-level waste and 140,435 cubic meters of low-level waste mixed with toxic chemicals could be brought to Hanford from other nuclear weapons production sites nationwide.

The shipments have already started, with 109 barrels of mixed waste from Rocky Flats, a plutonium processing plant near Denver.

“Hours after their record of decision, they started shipping mixed waste from Rocky Flats for disposal,” said Max Power of the state’s nuclear waste program office in a Friday conference call with reporters.

There are already 640,000 cubic meters of low-level waste buried in trenches at Hanford, plus tons of other tainted nuclear discards from decommissioning old plants, Power said. Now, even without any new waste imports to Hanford, “we’ll have more than two and a half square miles – over 1,220 football fields – covered with waste,” Power said.

In a prepared statement from Washington, D.C., the Energy Department said it was “disappointed” by the threatened legal action. DOE has already agreed to limit the amount of waste to be shipped to Hanford to 25 percent of the potential imports, has stopped dumping wastes in unlined trenches at Hanford and is promising to continue groundwater cleanup, said agency spokeswoman Colleen Clark.

“Our cleanup plans … meet every environmental and regulatory requirement,” the DOE statement said.

Until the end of the Cold War, Hanford was the largest of the nation’s 17 major nuclear weapons plants. It produced 75 tons of plutonium for nuclear weapons in a messy chemical separation process that spewed radiation and other toxins into the air, groundwater and the Columbia River. From World War II until the mid-1980s, Hanford and other weapons sites were shielded by national security and didn’t have to follow environmental laws on waste disposal.

The state will challenge in court the adequacy of the Energy Department’s environmental analysis. The federal government has never disclosed why it chose Hanford as the sole new disposal site for the nation, and it is ignoring tainted groundwater under Hanford’s 177 underground high-level waste tanks, said David Mears, a senior assistant attorney general working on the Hanford lawsuit.

“They’ve made a foregone conclusion that Hanford is the site all the waste will go to. They need to go back to the whole national plan, comparing the risks at Hanford to everywhere else,” Mears said.

In 1989, Washington state and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency signed a formal agreement with the Energy Department to clean up Hanford. The 30-year agreement has now been stretched to 39 years, with cleanup schedules for the underground tanks extending to 2028.

The Tri Party Agreement didn’t anticipate that the Energy Department would seek to import massive quantities of new nuclear garbage to Hanford, Mears said.

The state’s concerns grew when the Energy Department declared recently that groundwater under Hanford’s leaky high-level nuclear waste tanks is “irretrievably” damaged – a code word for giving up on a thorough groundwater cleanup, Mears said.

The Tri Party Agreement calls for emptying the tanks and treating the highly radioactive tank wastes.

In 1986, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated that groundwater probably traverses the seven to nine miles from the main Hanford dumping grounds to the Columbia in 10 to 20 years. Some of the underground pollution has already reached the river.