nuclear-news

Hanford nuclear waste site has a clean-up bill of 560 billion USD in Washington DC

2 as reported by the New York Times (June 1, 2023).

The Hanford site will never be fully decontaminated and will remain indefinitely.

Selected quotes:

“But construction of a five-story, 137,000 square-foot chemical treatment plant for the task was halted in 2012 — after an expenditure of $4 billion — when it was found to be riddled with safety defects. The naked superstructure of the plant has stood in mothballs for 11 years, a potent symbol of the nation’s failure, nearly 80 years after the Second World War, to deal decisively with the atomic era’s deadliest legacy.”

“Leaders of the Yakama Nation, an 11,000-member tribe whose ancestral lands once included the Hanford site, say their 1855 treaty promised that tribe members would have the right to hunt and fish on healthy lands.”

“Before the Manhattan Project, there was a handshake agreement that this area would be returned to the way it was,” said Trina Sherwood, a cultural specialist in the tribe’s natural resources department. “How can we agree to leave the poison in the land?”

“Yet returning the land to what it once was is an outcome that almost no one expects.”

“There are parts of the site that will never be turned over,” Mr. Vance, the Hanford site manager, said. “We are going to be here a long time.”

New York Times Article, Published June 1, 2023

By Ralph Vartabedian, Reporting from Richland, Wash. May 31, 2023

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/us/nuclear-waste-cleanup.html#:~:text=A%20%24528%20billion%20plan%20to,are%20looking%20for%20a%20compromise.&text=Reporting%20from%20Richland%2C%20Wash.

July 3, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized