Hanford gets huge fine for violations
Washington state has issued its largest-ever fine for violations of hazardous waste regulations at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation.
The $270,000 fine announced Tuesday cites the federal government and two Hanford contractors for shipping wastes from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River Project in South Carolina without proper manifests and records to verify the contents of 83 drums.
The problems were discovered in April during a routine inspection – prompting an investigation that led the Department of Ecology to issue the fine.
“This penalty is a big, fat wake-up call,” said Ecology director Linda Hoffman. “They aren’t following proper procedures to verify what’s going into the drums of waste sent to Hanford, so no one knows for sure what’s in those drums.”
“We have a sense of outrage about this,” said agency spokeswoman Sheryl Hutchison. “We’ve had 50 years at Hanford where they didn’t know what they’ve put into the ground. We’d like to think they’ve changed.”
Starting in the mid-1940s, Hanford made plutonium for the nation’s nuclear weapons arsenal. It was a messy chemical process that spewed radioactive waste into the air, the groundwater and the Columbia River. The extent of the environmental contamination wasn’t revealed until 1986, when public pressure forced disclosure of government documents showing major environmental problems at Hanford. It is now the nation’s largest and priciest nuclear waste cleanup site.
This week’s large fine is justified by the nature of the violations and by the Energy Department’s poor history of compliance with environmental regulations, said Mike Wilson, manager of Ecology’s nuclear waste program.
“This is a very serious offense, and we are concerned that it’s just the tip of the iceberg. At this point, we have no confidence in the waste tracking system at Hanford,” Wilson said.
Hanford officials are reviewing the bills of lading for the waste shipments to determine how they were handled and whether the contents were properly listed, said Colleen French, DOE spokeswoman in Richland.
“This boils down to a disagreement about how to characterize a limited amount of hazardous waste,” French said.
The Energy Department has 30 days to decide whether to appeal the fine to the state Pollution Control Hearings Board.
Ecology officials suspect that some of the drums contain transuranic wastes – long-lived nuclear discards that include extremely toxic plutonium – and may violate a May 2003 federal court injunction against further shipments of transuranics to Hanford.
One to 12 of the 83 drums could contain transuranics, said Ecology inspector Bob Wilson. Ecology has ordered the Energy Department and its contractors to characterize the drums correctly.
Shipping waste that may contain transuranics to Hanford is contempt of court when an injunction is in place and shows the Energy Department can’t be trusted, said Seattle lawyer Jerry Pollett. Pollett is the director of Heart of America Northwest, a group supporting Initiative 297, a measure on the Nov. 2 ballot that would require contaminated sites like Hanford to be cleaned up before more waste can be added.
The nuclear trash at the center of the controversy is from Hanford’s high-level waste tanks, which contain millions of gallons of liquid wastes left over from the chemical separation of plutonium.
Since 1986, some of the tank contents have been shipped to the Savannah River Project, a federal weapons site. They’ve been used to study vitrification techniques to turn radioactive waste into a form of glass, and they can legally be shipped back to Hanford when researchers have finished with them.
But this spring, the state inspectors discovered that other waste, including contaminated laboratory equipment generated in the Savannah River experiments, was also being shipped back to Hanford.
Much of the paperwork to document the nature of the waste was lost, missing or inaccurate, Wilson said. “This is how you lose control of hazardous waste,” he added.