nuclear-news

The reactions by politicians to this news have come off like bad attempts at satire. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, the chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resource Commission, has said that he will make Hanford cleanup a priority during upcoming confirmation hearings for the next energy secretary. Washington governor Inslee assured residents that the leaks posed no immediate danger. “We were told this problem was dealt with years ago, and was under control,” Inslee said after the initial announcement. There is so much impotence behind those words that you can almost see the governor shrugging his shoulders. After all, Inslee knows as well as anybody that the larger problem of Hanford was not dealt with years ago. Nor is it adequately being dealt with now.

Hanford is the worst kind of mess: the kind that humanity is capable of making, but not capable of cleaning up. It was the home of the world’s first full-scale plutonium reactor and the epicenter of American nuclear production during the Cold War. Now the 586-square mile campus is the subject of the largest environmental cleanup operation the United States government has ever undertaken. There are other sites in America with long nuclear histories — places like Oak Ridge, Los Alamos, Yucca Mountain. But none have become sprawling disasters with quite as much panache as Hanford.

The entire city of Los Angeles could fit rather comfortably within Hanford’s borders in southeastern Washington, but the human and environmental consequences of Hanford have spread beyond those borders, across Washington and Oregon. A decade ago a rash of radioactive tumbleweeds blew across the nearby plains. In the early 1960s, an irradiated whale was killed off the Oregon coast, having apparently been contaminated by nuclear waste flowing down the Columbia River. Hanford does not have the feel of a seeping hellscape — the problems there are slow-developing and spread out —but it does have a real effect on the environment and people around it…….http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/24/at-the-hanford-nuclear-reservation-a-steady-drip-of-toxic-trouble.html