Will US Clean Hanford Nuke Waste Or Make More?

opinion by Pat Lavelle, Free Press contributor

In the little-known 1958 horror movie X the Unknown, British army specialists in Scotland make a startling discovery: radioactive mud is seeping out of the ground. They spend the rest of the movie attempting to contain it, as it slowly harms everything in its path.

More than forty years later, a similar story, set amidst the rolling plains and roiled waters of eastern Washington State, is unfolding. Specialists have discovered radioactivity seeping out of the ground, with unknown effects on salmon stocks, crops, and human health. But this time the story is more deadly. It is real. Moreover, while in recent years there have been efforts to clean up Hanford, there is now a frightening move to begin more dangerous nuclear work there using what is called a Fast Flux Test Facility.

The sobering story of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation began in 1943, when it was built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the DuPont Company. Hanford produced plutonium for some of the world's first atomic weapons, including the test bomb detonated in New Mexico in 1945, and the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in the same year. During the Cold War era, the facility and its thousands of workers played a key role in the testing and production of weapons-grade radioactive materials.

Today the facility sits crumbling, as government officials oversee with questionable efficacy a massive cleanup project. By all accounts, it will take many decades and tens of billions of dollars to clean up. Indeed, it is realistic to believe that Hanford--America's most toxic and radioactive site and one of the most contaminated spots in the world--may never be safe within the span of human existence. Now, ironically, it is the supposed advancement of human health that enthusiasts are citing as a reason to restart a crumbling nuclear reactor at the site. They want to toss twenty years of nuclear cleanup into the drink and get back into the business of producing more.

The Fast Flux Test Facility, or FFTF, is an experimental reactor built at Hanford in the late 1970s. It shut down in 1983, when new missions for it could not be identified. For the past seventeen years, nuclear entrepreneurs and politicians have been trying to resurrect it.

The current proposal, on which the US Department of Energy will decide in late 2000, seeks to restart FFTF to produce medical isotopes and fuel for NASA, and to conduct nuclear research. FFTF is a bad idea for the following reasons:

• Many medical experts including Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Washington State Medical Association oppose it.

• NASA has a renewable contract with the Russians for plutonium and is developing other, safer fuel methods.

• The Department of Energy has never satisfactorily examined the effect that thousands of meters of new nuclear waste created by FFTF would have on Hanford's overwhelmed, crumbling storage facilities.

• Randall Bonebrake, a whistleblower at a private company in Ellensburg, four years ago revealed that the proposal to make medical isotopes and conduct research was a ploy to justify restarting the reactor to make new material for nuclear bombs.

• Government-paid experts concluded several years ago that renewed operations at FFTF could "trigger a very severe accident" with potentially "catastrophic" results.

This plan to turn back history, and drag our taxes back into active nuclear operations deserves more than a little public scrutiny.

Pat Lavelle is intake coordinator and research assistant at the Government Accountability Project, a non-profit law and advocacy group that protects whistleblowers at Hanford and elsewhere. To get involved in the battle to stop the reactor, call the Hanford watchdog group, Heart of America Northwest, at (206) 382-1014.