Hanford: America's festering Cold War wound

Back in the day, radioactive materials in boxes and 55-gallon drums are dumped in a trench at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richmond, Wash. /U.S. Department of Energy image

The revelation this week that at least six antiquated toxic waste storage tanks are leaking at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is the latest environmental abomination at America's worst nuclear contamination site.

Tucked into a bend in the Columbia River, Hanford is home to the United States' first large-scale nuclear reactor, which was developed as part of the Manhattan Project to produce plutonium for nuclear bombs. Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known to science ... a single grain of the radioactive material lodged in a human's lung can result in terminal cancer.

The original Hanford reactor was retired in 1968, but, like syphilis, the plutonium factory site is a gift that keeps on giving.

About 53 million gallons of variously toxic and radioactive waste, enough deadly brew to fill dozens of Olympic-sized swimming pools, are festering in 177 storage tanks at Hanford. Most of the tanks are single-lined and were designed with 20-year lifespans. USA Today reports that at least 1 million gallons of liquid waste material has already leaked from tanks at Hanford.

"None of these tanks would be acceptable for use today. They are all beyond their design life. None of them should be in service," Tom Carpenter of Hanford Challenge, a watchdog group, said this week. "And yet, they're holding two-thirds of the nation's high-level nuclear waste."

In the late 1940s, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation was sited in Richmond, Wash., because its relatively remote location was well-suited for the top secret facility and the nearby Columbia River provided a ready supply of water to cool nuclear reactors. /Image via nydailynews.com

'They knew there was nowhere safe to store this waste'

The environmental disaster playing out at Hanford first came to my attention about a dozen years ago, when I was working at the Boston Herald. One of the best benefits of working at the Herald was the "Giveaway Shelf," old filing cabinets that lined the entryway to the newsroom on top of which the books editor would periodically stack as many as 100 unwanted advanced copies of books that publishers had sent to the paper, hoping they would get favorable reviews.

One of the treasures I plucked from the "Giveaway Shelf" is Aftermath: The Remnants of War by Donovan Webster. Published in 1996, Aftermath examines the legacy of 20th century warfare, from the explosive ordnance still being plucked from the forests of France, to the bones of German and Russian soldiers that still rise from the ground around a city that was once called Stalingrad, to the glass-covered nuclear bomb test sites in the Nevada desert, to the carcinogenic jungles of Vietnam, to the abandoned mine fields of Kuwait.

As reported in Aftermath, Hanford is one of America's most toxic "national sacrifice zones," more than 2,000 square miles of territory sprinkled across the country that will be off-limits to the general public for thousands of years because of high radioactivity levels.

One of Webster's most interesting interview subjects was James Werner, who was at the time director of the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Strategic Planning and Analysis. In 1995, Werner published the DOE's first comprehensive environmental report on U.S. nuclear weapons production sites. The key findings of Werner's report included the following:
- The United States had at least 10,500 radioactive sites that required stabilization and secure storage for an indeterminable future.
- There were no long-term storage facilities for U.S. nuclear weapons production waste and no plans to create long-term storage facilities.
- Even if the DOE refused to authorize the creation of more nuclear weapons-grade materials, maintenance of existing nuclear weapons production-related waste sites would cost taxpayers more than $230 billion through 2070.

"It's a quarter-trillion dollars," Werner told the Aftermath author. "When I told the President's Office of Management and Budget the figure, they looked at me like I had two heads. They said, 'On our books, only the national deficit is going to cost more.' And I said, 'Hey, don't shoot the messenger, the Cold War created the problem.'"

With no safe way to store radioactive waste, Aftermath describes unthinkable radioactive waste storage nightmares at DOE facilities such as the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory, where it was common practice in the 1950s and 1960s to dig long trenches and bury 55-gallon drums of radioactive waste.

"The engineers and scientists who were doing this, they knew what was happening," Werner said. "But they were protected by national security, so they didn't have to care. They knew there was nowhere safe to store this waste. So, for instance, they kept it liquified in big tanks at Hanford, with motorized stirrers to keep the liquid moving; that way, maybe it wouldn't get hot and explode."

This 1994 photograph shows radioactive sludge stored at Hanford in Tank T-111, which is reportedly leaking as much as 300 gallons of material per year. The tank, which holds nearly a half million gallons of sludge, was put into service in 1945. /U.S. Department of Energy image

We've been here before 

State and federal officials are saying it will take years for the latest radioactive leaks from Hanford's storage tanks to reach the Columbia River. But don't be fooled by this bullshit taken verbatim from a page in the public relations crisis-management textbook:

• Radioactive liquids from earlier leaking storage tanks have already reached the river.
• It may take years for the most recent leaked toxic sludge to reach the river, but these materials will continue to be radioactive for hundreds and, in some cases, thousands of years.
• The Columbia is one of the longest rivers in the United States, and the river basin is rich in agricultural and fishery resources.
• Hundreds of thousands of people live near the river's edge downstream of the Hanford site, which is only 200 miles away from Portland, Ore., where the Columbia spills into the Pacific Ocean.