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Conservation Concerns in Washington: Hanford Cleanup, Wilderness

2011 Activities: The Washington chapter is awaiting the U.S. Department of Energy's response to the chapter's support for  Alternative 6B in DOE's Tank Closure and Waste Management EIS. Alternative 6B would entail "clean closure" of the 177 tanks that hold an estimated 53 million gallons of hazardous and radioactive wastes leftover from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation's 40-plus years of weapons plutonium production. Washington chapter members toured Hanford on April 28, 2011. From a distance, they saw "cocooned" plutonium production reactors, processing facility "canyons" used to extract plutonium from irradiated fuel,

Hanford B Reactor. From this view, visitors can see where fuel rods and cooling water pipes were threaded through the graphite moderator. (Photo: DOE)

and the closed Fast Flux Test Facility, a liquid metal-cooled reseach reactor that was built to test materials for the now discontinued fast breeder reactor program. In addition, they visited one of the work sites where mixed radioactive and hazardous chemical waste is being pumped out of underground storage tanks, viewed an enormous landfill for Hanford's low-level radioactive, hazardous and mixed wastes, and saw the  construction site for a vitrification plant designed to stabilize tank wastes within glass for permanent disposal. The group visited the B Reactor, a National Historic Landmark that was the world's first full-scale nuclear reactor, which irradiated uranium fuel to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons, including the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on  August 9, 1945. (Note: Taking of photographs was not permitted on the tour.)

For more information about Hanford, read ConservAmerica's commentary on Hanford and the cleanup project.

2010 Activities: The Washington chapter signed on to an April 29, 2010 letter to Energy Secretary Steven Chu urging him to withdraw Records of Decision that select Hanford as a disposal site for large volumes of low-level radioactive waste and mixed low-level radioactive waste.

On March 12, 2010, the chapter filed an official comment letter on the Department of Energy's  draft Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement for Hanford. The document examines alternatives for retrieving, treating, storing, and/or disposing of radioactive and hazardous waste. The Washington chapter strongly recommended that DOE eliminate consideration of shipping offsite radioactive waste to Hanford for storage and/or processing.

Background: Hanford is the most polluted place in the Western Hemisphere. The radioactive and chemical byproducts of plutoniuim production created a huge legacy of wastes, including nearly 500 billion gallons of wastes dumped into unlined soil trenches, ponds, French drains, and injection wells. At least one-third of the 177 tanks have leaked a plume of wastes that endangers the Columbia River.

In 1989, Washington State, the U.S. Department of Energy, and Environmental Protection Agency signed the Tri-Party Agreement, a binding agreement that calls for cleanup of wastes by negotiated milestones. But poor federal management has pushed cleanup of the tanks back repeatedly and driven up the costs. Estimated cost of the vitrification plant to dispose of the wastes has soared past $11 billion.

In 2009, the state, Department of Energy, and EPA revised their agreement to extend cleanup deadlines. The deadline for removing waste from single-shell tanks was extended from 2018 to 2040, and the completion deadline for treating tank waste was extended from 2028 to 2047.

Wilderness

 The National Wilderness Preservation System protects pristine public lands where, in the eloquent words of the Wilderness Act, "the earth and its community of life are untrammelled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain." As of October 2011, the system contains more than 109 million acres of forests, deserts, wetlands, and other natural areas, of which more than 4.5 million acres are in Washington. 

On February 10, 2011, Congressman Dave Reichert, R-WA, reintroduced bipartisan legislation to expand the Alpine Lakes Wilderness by 22,000 acres, or 6 percent. The bill also would designate the Pratt River and the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River as wild and scenic. “Americans can find common ground in protecting what is most valuable to us - the naturally beautiful terrain and wildlife that helped shape history and people of the American West," Congressman Reichert said.

Congress should pass Congressman Reichert's legislation this year.

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