Hanford radioactive waste needs more, not less, safety regulation

A nuclear disaster at a cleanup site like Hanford is to be avoided at all costs. The persistence of radioactivity in the environment for thousands of years makes large areas of land uninhabitable, and wreaks an ongoing and incalculable human health toll. Prevention, rather than reaction, to such tragedies should be driving law and policy.

(USA) Nuclear cleanup regulation could put public at risk, Seattle Times, July 9, 2010, The weaknesses of federal regulatory agencies have been exposed by recent high-profile accidents. Tom Carpenter fears the Department of Energy will reduce its oversight of cleanup at the nation’s nuclear waste sites.
Millions of gallons of oil gush continue to rush unabated from BP’s mile-deep well in the Gulf of Mexico, and 11 workers are dead from the massive explosion that caused the biggest oil spill in decades. Weeks before this event, the news was dominated by the preventable explosion that killed 29 West Virginia coal miners……………. Is nuclear next? The Department of Energy sits on the nation’s biggest nuclear nightmare. Its inventories of highly radioactive and toxic wastes defy comprehension. Washingtonians are familiar with the DOE’s No. 1 accomplishment, the Hanford nuclear site, which holds the lion’s share of the nation’s radioactive detritus. Suffice it to say that the escape of even a small fraction of such material into the environment would constitute a Chernobyl-sized catastrophe…….
……..a memorandum in March ….announced the reorganization of DOE’s safety oversight function.

Authored by the deputy secretary of Energy, the March 16 memo sounds all the themes and code words that precede dangerous scale-back of the regulatory function such as contractors being free to implement safety programs “in light of their situation without excessive Federal oversight or overly prescriptive departmental requirements.” Regulatory actions are to happen only at the “lowest appropriate level of contractor and Federal management.” The shift to self-regulation by the same contractors who stand to be penalized for wrongdoing is the standard recipe for unhappy surprises like coal mine explosion and the oil spill.

The Energy Department’s memo follows a 2004 agency reorganization that abolished the health oversight office — a move protested by Govs. Chris Gregoire and Bill Richardson of New Mexico. The functions in that office were transferred to the Health, Safety and Security Administration (HSSA), run by a civil servant with no political power.

This leads to the question of what we can expect next, now that we have had a financial meltdown, a coal mine disaster, and an oil drilling explosion, all within the last two years. A nuclear disaster at a cleanup site like Hanford is to be avoided at all costs. The persistence of radioactivity in the environment for thousands of years makes large areas of land uninhabitable, and wreaks an ongoing and incalculable human health toll. Prevention, rather than reaction, to such tragedies should be driving law and policy.

Opinion | Nuclear cleanup regulation could put public at risk | Seattle Times Newspaper