Preface. Plutonium for nuclear weapons was produced at the Hanford Washington site for nearly four decades. Today it is the world’s most polluted site chock-a-block with radioactive waste and toxic chemicals.

The department of energy estimates a clean-up could cost as much as $641 billion dollars (DOE 2022). Six years ago, the estimate was $110 billion.  It’s a ticking time bomb that could release radioactive materials like Chernobyl and Fukushima if facilities were ruptured by an earthquake, fire, or explosion.

Hanford’s groundwater has already gone nuclear, with 450 billion gallons of radioactive liquids in the 200 square miles of aquifer below.

On land there are 25 million cubic feet of buried solid waste, spent nuclear fuel, and even leftover plutonium (half-life 24,000 years). Another 53 million gallons of radioactive and chemically hazardous waste remain stored in 177 leaky underground tanks far beyond their life expectancy, with at least 63 believed to be leaking.

When the contamination sinks enough and enters the Columbia river, it will be a long term threat to the people, fish, and ecosystems (Bernton 2019, Cornwall 2015, Frank 2022, NRC 2016, ODE 2017).

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If there is one thing we can do for the 40,000 future generations of grandchildren, it is cleaning up nuclear waste now while we have the fossil fuels to do it.  The grandchildren can’t haul it off on horse carts. It is one of the few actions we can take since we can’t refill aquifers, bring back extinct species, restore eroded topsoil, or get rid of toxic and forever chemicals. Nuclear supporters like to brush storage off waste as a political problem that can be solved. But only Finland is actually creating a safe space underground to store nuclear waste in the future.  I doubt Yucca mountain or other waste storage facilities will ever be built, since once an energy crisis hits and oil is declines exponentially, it will be diverted to growing food, distributing goods and other essential uses.

So clearly this is a crazy “solution” for climate change. Not only that but nuclear power plants emit a huge amount of CO2 over their entire life cycle, from construction, mining, milling, transporting, refining, enrichment, waste reprocessing/disposal, fabrication, operation and decommissioning (Pearce 2008). Especially now that the concentration of uranium in ore is declining as well and many existing uranium mines are near the end of their lifespan (Barnham 2015).

And what’s the point? They won’t keep the electric grid up because they aren’t flexible enough to balance renewable power.  Natural gas is the long-term storage, and peak load provider, and coming to the rescue to backup for intermittent power within microseconds of when it dies or comes back to life. Nuclear power is baseload power that runs at a steady rate. They take days to ramp up and down, which damages their financial health and the facility itself since that harms the reactor (DOE 2020, NREL 2020).

 It’s also crazy because of peak Uranium. 

Well, some of my kindle notes follow, but the don’t begin to capture the story in the book, which you should buy in hard copy for the day when the grid comes down for good so that future generations can be warned about reactor and uranium mining sites. There are 500 sites on the Navajo nation land — this is covered in the book but not below, and so much more.  The corruption of Bechtel sucking up your taxpayer dollars to clean up the mess and doing a spectacularly bad job at it, endangering live. And trying to hush up whistleblowers. This is really an exciting book on so many levels, ought to be a movie!

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com  Author of Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy; When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Women in ecology  Podcasts: WGBH, Financial Sense, Jore, Planet: Critical, Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, Kunstler 253 &278, Peak Prosperity,  Index of best energyskeptic posts

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Frank J (2022) Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America. Haymarket Books.

Hanford was home to the US government’s gargantuan plutonium operation for nearly four decades. The site churned out nearly all of the radioactive fuel that was used in the country’s nuclear arsenal. Hanford reached maximum production during the height of the Cold War. Now, however, Hanford no longer produces plutonium.

Today it’s a sprawling wasteland of radioactive and chemical sewage, a landmass three times larger than Lake Tahoe. The costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet.

Why haven’t you heard much about this dismal atomic graveyard? It’s hard not to think that the lack of awareness is intentional. How else to explain its obscurity? You’ve probably heard of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl. Why not Hanford?

Not only is the site laced with huge amounts of radioactive gunk, but all that waste is also a ticking time bomb that could erupt at any given moment, creating a nuclear Chernobyl-like explosion, resulting in a singular tragedy that would be unlike anything the United States has ever experienced.

The local alehouse, boorishly named Atomic Ale Brewpub, showcases beers like Plutonium Porter, Half-Life Hefeweizen, and even the Atom Bustin’ IPA. The kitschy logo over at the local Richland High School, home of “The Bombers,” brandishes a mushroom cloud exploding out of a giant “R.” And the local hardware store, which peddles T-shirts with the high school’s emblem, sells out every time government officials fly in from Washington, DC. A fervent, mystifying patriotism still runs deep in Richland, and there is no mistaking that it’s diehard Republican country. Benton County, where Richland is located, voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump twice, most recently by a 20% margin over Biden.

It’s an immensely complicated saga, and the Department of Energy intentionally makes it difficult to understand what is going on. In a world where there was actual, transparent accountability, the DOE would have a fancy website, database, and fat annual reports that detailed the intricacies of the money being spent on the cleanup. They would include flow charts, pie charts, and details about the endless contractors, the workers they employ, the jobs they carry out, and the science behind their decision-making. There would be frequent congressional testimonies, citizen councils, worker councils, and independent oversight committees. But none of this exists

Sure, we know the big numbers, the amount of cash that contractors like Bechtel score. The costs of the cleanup keep escalating, but the majority of radioactive sludge still sits right where it’s always been. Currently, the DOE estimates the job could run as much as $640.6 billion dollars (DOE 2022). Six years ago, the estimate was $110 billion.

Today, $2.6 billion is being spent annually. That number, despite threats to cut it, continues to grow. Every few years, Bechtel signs another lucrative contract extension, with a ballooning bill attached, that we, the US taxpayer, write the checks for. Most recently, their work on one of the most important facilities at Hanford was projected to cost $41 billion. Just five years ago, the same work was projected to run only $16 billion. It’s hard to keep up. Even with these crazy, ever-changing cost projections, we aren’t privy to the inner workings and technicalities of these huge contracts, which no doubt would invite the type of scrutiny they are hoping to avoid. Freedom of Information Act requests that would give journalists and activists insights into these affairs are often denied, with technicalities and issues of national security cited. Or, like my own, are totally ignored.

Rachel Maddow at MSNBC picked up the story. The New York Times followed, tailed by the Los Angeles Times and CNN. But like so much at Hanford, the mainstream spotlight faded as fast as it had appeared. There are reasons for this, no doubt, aside from DOE reluctance to let us in. The radio silence also has to do with the sheer volume of the work going on and its inherent complexities. Then there is the other big issue, that pulling back the curtain on the Hanford charade would expose the futility and senselessness not only of the United States’ ugly past but of nuclear technology more generally.

If the US public were made aware of the risks posed by Hanford’s radioactive waste, we would surely question the validity of resurrecting the noxious nuclear power industry, which is now being heralded as a key weapon, so to speak, in the fight against climate change.

I am terrified by what a nuclear accident at Hanford would look like and by the lives and lands that such an incident would forever destroy. I am perplexed by the lack of accountability and angered by the enormous profit margins and corporate influence that plague nearly every aspect of the cleanup. I am upset that the DOE is understaffed and the contractors are so mismanaged. I am worried, too, about the workers who are putting their lives on the line every single day, and I am astonished that their unions don’t do more to help out.

General Groves quashed concerns by telling locals who were perplexed as to why the Army Corps wished to acquire their properties, “If I told you what the government is doing, I’d be court-martialed tomorrow.” The War Powers Act of 1941 allowed the federal government to take the land and homes from residents, which it swiftly did. Many residents were only given thirty days to move out. Newly planted lawns and summer heat created the perfect conditions for mosquitoes, and from 1947 to 1949, outbreaks consumed the growing city. Massive amounts of DDT were sprayed throughout Richland’s streets to combat the insects, and residents were advised to cover their screen doors with the chemical, despite ominous scientific reports at the time that warned of DDT’s dangers.

From 1956 to 1965, Hanford operated at peak capacity, producing 63 short tons of plutonium that fueled virtually all of the United States’ nuclear arsenal. At the time, Hanford’s nuclear reactors were the biggest culprit of radiation. They needed constant cooling, requiring an estimated 75,000 gallons of water from the Columbia River to be pumped in each minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. After treated water ran through the reactors’ cooling systems, it was drained into retention basins, where, now radioactive, it sat for six long hours before it flowed back into the Columbia, virtually nonstop. The water was still hot and raised temperatures in the river. In other instances, the reactors were “flushed,” releasing radioactive contamination into the Columbia River.

As with many of the furtive inner-workings at Hanford, information about these various episodes was withheld from the public until the 1980s and 1990s, even though radiation was discovered as far as 200 miles downriver on the Oregon and Washington coasts, exposing an estimated 2000 people to dangerous doses. That wasn’t the worst of it. The most significant radioactive events occurred between 1947 and 1951, when 200 different radionuclides, including significant amounts of the most feared fission byproduct, iodine-131, went airborne during the process of separating plutonium and uranium, contaminating countless people and upward of 75,000 square miles of land in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and parts of British Columbia. Iodine-131 can accumulate in the thyroid glands of humans and other unfortunate animals, causing cancerous growths.

In a secret military experiment known as the “Green Run,” held over a two-day period in early December 1949, between 7 to 12,000 curies of iodine-131 were released in an immense 200-by-40 mile plume that spread across the region. A single curie is 37 billion atoms, and between 1944 and 1957, Hanford produced 725,000 curies of iodine-131. By contrast, the accident at Three Mile Island released 15 to 24 curies of iodine-131.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the normal timeframe for cooling uranium fuel was 100 days (today, uranium is cooled for 180 days), which allowed iodine-131 to decay to slightly more moderate levels. But in the case of the Green Run, uranium fuel was cooled for a mere 16 days, and remained “green.” Worse yet, filters that scrubbed the radioactive iodine before it entered the air were removed for the test.

The Green Run wasn’t the first time Hanford officials purposely released dangerous amounts of radioactive iodine. Five years prior to the Green Run, the US Army Corps of Engineers conducted wartime research to determine how wind currents carried radiation. These tests, which first became public in 1987, were not solely designed to determine how radiation impacted the environment or the local population, who should have been evacuated. Instead, they were reportedly carried out to determine if their testing equipment worked accurately. The details of Green Run, which remain largely secret to this day under the guise of national security, have led some to believe the tests were not initiated to monitor equipment or radiation’s impact on local ecology, but rather to test iodine-131 as an agent of radioactive warfare. Regardless of intention, little is known about what nefarious impacts these tests had on people downwind or on the Hanford employees handling the experiments.

While Hanford’s nuclear plants aren’t pumping today, and despite the fact that the site no longer produces fuel for nuclear bombs, radioactive waste still remains. Tons of it.

Hanford’s groundwater also went nuclear. Over its lifespan, nuclear production discharged 450 billion gallons of radioactive liquids into the soil.  Today, 200 square miles of aquifer beneath Hanford is contaminated, and 53 million gallons of radioactive and chemically hazardous waste remain stored in 177 leaky underground tanks that were built in the 1970s. In addition, Hanford has approximately 25 million cubic feet (750,000 cubic meters) of buried solid waste, spent nuclear fuel, and even leftover plutonium Bernton 2019, NRC 2016)

The colossal legacy of Hanford, which now accounts for two-thirds of all high-level radioactive waste in the country, is fraught with calamity—a lingering atomic wreckage with little sign of being remediated anytime soon, if ever. In the meantime, contractors hired by the DOE are making out like bandits at taxpayer expense, with virtually no significant public oversight. Remediation deadlines are consistently missed, upper management is continually in flux, and brave whistle-blowers have to risk their livelihoods just to be heard.

In the immediate aftermath of the Hanford project, 430 million curies of man-made radioactivity remained, 185 million of which were in the form of discarded nuclear material, plus 65,000 metric tons of solid waste were still stored on site and a massive amount of radioactive chemical waste (220,000 metric tons) sat in aging tanks that would soon begin to leak.

The first sign of legitimate danger at Hanford, at least when it came to the US public’s attention, occurred in June 1973, when a massive storage unit called 106-T at the complex’s tank farm was confirmed to have leaked 115,000 gallons of boiling radioactive goop into the sandy soil surrounding its underground hull.  The incident showed that another such accident, and one of an even greater magnitude, could happen at one of Hanford’s other storage tanks.

What was perhaps most alarming about the 1973 event was that not a single person could say exactly how long 106-T had been leaking or what had caused the tank to crack in the first place. For a full 51 days, an average of 2,100 gallons of gunk had seeped out of 106-T every 24 hours. In total, 151,000 gallons emptied into the soil, which included 40,000 curies of cesium-137, four curies of plutonium, 14 curies of strontium-90 and other, slightly less toxic sludge. There had also been numerous leaks at Hanford in the early years. In 1958, 15 different tanks leaked some 422,000 gallons of a similar nuclear waste by-product. Yet the 106-T was an entirely different animal. The 1973 accident was the largest single radioactive waste disaster in the history of Hanford, if not the United States,

The tanks were a short-term fix to a problem with no long-term solution. They knew they couldn’t just dump the waste into the Columbia River, so piping the stuff into hulking underground tanks seemed the obvious choice to the engineers of the 1940s. The waste was so hot it would boil, not for hours or days or even months, but for decades to come. Engineers hoped a better remedy would reveal itself down the road. Such are the pitfalls of nuclear waste, and over the years Hanford’s reactors produced unfathomable amounts of this steaming radioactive soup.

When the AEC took control of Hanford after the end of World War II, they knew they had to do something to curtail a potential tank waste fiasco, so they developed a system that would keep the tank contents cool, designing contraptions to stir the waste so the hot gunk wouldn’t settle and end up leaking out the bottom. This workaround was imperfect at best.

From 1958 to 1965, administrators recorded mishaps at nine different units, and these tanks would continue to spring leaks throughout the 1970s. Some leaks were small, but others were quite large: in total, upwards of 55,000 to 115,000 gallons of scalding atomic waste escaped, followed by the 106-T incident. The tanks were also emptied on occasion to make room for new waste. Between 1946 and 1958, nearly 130 million gallons of waste had been discharged into the soil. Much of this waste went untreated, leaving behind an estimated 275,000 metric tons of chemicals and sixty thousand curies of radioactivity, a portion of which polluted local aquifers. The ongoing pattern of leaks, workarounds, and government secrecy ought to have been alarming to anyone who understood the risks.

Hanford’s storage tanks were not constructed to last forever, or even a fraction of the lifespan of their contents, and Hanford contractors were well aware of this fact. An isotope of plutonium (Pu-239), for example, has a half-life of over 24,000 years. So after 24,000 years, half of all the plutonium that leaks out of one of these shoddy tanks will still be as virulent as the day it was first released.

Hanford had another big problem. They didn’t have enough tanks to hold all the already existing waste, or the waste they would continue producing. Yet in 1959, despite the lack of storage, the AEC denied a request to build new storage units. It was not until 1964, after additional pleas, that the AEC finally gave the go-ahead to construct new tanks. Before these new tanks were finally approved, more and more waste was pumped into the older units, creating a host of problems, the most serious of which was that more nuke waste meant more heat and an increased risk of a serious accident.

In 1959 Congressional testimony, Herbert M. Parker, who served as a manager of the tank farm, said he had no reason to believe the underground storage units would not hold up for many “decades” to come. When asked if there had ever been a problem in the past, Parker replied, “We are persuaded that none has ever leaked.” It was nonsense. A secret Government Accounting Office (GAO) report from 1968 revealed Parker had lied, and that for years officials had withheld information from the public about potentially disastrous issues with Hanford’s tanks. The GAO report noted that at least 227,000 gallons of waste had bled into the soil from ten different units, the first of which, an alarming 35,000 gallons, occurred six months prior to Parker’s congressional testimony. It was a leak he most certainly knew about.

Outside experts continually alerted the AEC that the tanks were not up to snuff. “Current analysis by the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) have revealed that the self-boiling tank structures are being stressed beyond accepted design limits,” read one such report. IIT also put the life expectancy of the tanks at two decades, and in some cases, even less. Yet the AEC, in the name of anticommunism, ignored these distress signals. Instead of being reevaluated, Hanford’s processing plants ran nonstop, churning out thousands of gallons of atomic waste every single day to challenge the United States’ Soviet nemesis.

Hanford operation manager Thomas A. Nemzek told the Los Angeles Times in a 1973 interview that not only had none of the leaked waste made it into the groundwater, but that even if it did, it would take upward of 1,000 years to reach the Columbia river, by which time its effects would be inconsequential.

But not everyone bought Nemzek’s dismissive rationale. A study by the National Academy of Sciences, the comptroller general’s report and other geological surveys all countered Nemzek’s claim. These reports further noted that aside from the groundwater issue and depending on the scale of the leak, radioactive particles could go airborne, which would result in immediate and potentially nationwide impacts.

Aside from radioactivity blowing in the wind, there was another big issue: Hanford sat on shaky ground. As early as 1955, the National Academy of Sciences’ National Resource Council put together a committee, Geological Aspects of Radioactive Waste Disposal, to look into AEC operations. What they found was startling. The committee was not convinced that leaving radioactive waste to sit in the dirt was a particularly bright idea. When looking at two of the United States’ nuclear weapon sites, Hanford and the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) in southeastern Idaho, the committee noted that at both sites it is assumed no water from the surface precipitation percolates down to the water table, but there is no conclusive evidence that this is the case.

Like the tanks releasing waste into Hanford’s soil, shallow underground pipes at Idaho’s NRTS had released nuke waste into the ground, and as with Hanford, the AEC assured everyone that it wasn’t worth the worry. In their echoes of Herbert M. Parker’s congressional testimony, the AEC was either lying or belligerently naive. Later a 1970 report by the Federal Water Quality Administration proved as much, noting that a leak had indeed sprung from pipes at NRTS, and nuclear waste had made its way into Idaho’s groundwater supplies. Another accident at NRTS, in 1972, discharged 18,600 gallons of “sodium-bearing waste” during a transfer from one holding tank to another. In this instance, an estimated 15,900 curies of strontium-90, a radioactive isotope, also leaked. As of 2006, the accident was still having a negative impact, and groundwater near the site exceeded drinking water standards for strontium-90 (twenty-eight-year half-life), iodine-129 (sixteen-million-year half-life), and technetium-99 (211,000-year half-life), along with other radioactive particles. To make things worse, the DOE’s Idaho branch released a startling report in April 2006 warning that groundwater in the Snake River Plain would exceed drinking water standards for strontium-90 until the year 2095.

By 1973 the AEC recognized the long-term necessity of properly disposing of Hanford’s tank waste. They initiated a program to turn the radioactive muck into a solid substance in as little as three years. Doing so proved virtually impossible, which is why the tanks were filled up in the first place.

By 1985, despite $7 billion spent over the previous ten years, no progress had been made in ridding the aging tanks of their contents.

Toxic chemicals to worry about in addition to radioactive waste

If you thought breathing in microscopic drops of COVID-19 was bad for your lungs, try inhaling a little of the vapor emanating from the exhaust pipes of Hanford’s burping waste tanks.

While over 1,800 chemicals are known to exist at Hanford, a handful are proven to be the most destructive: dimethylmercury, benzene, carbon tetrachloride, and n-nitrosodimethylamine (NDMA), along with several others. Perhaps the most toxic chemical emanating from the underground tanks, dimethylmercury can enter the human body through ingestion, inhalation, or even a splash to the skin.

“Dimethylmercury is probably one of the most insidious, most dangerous compounds that could be in the breathing environment anywhere,” said Dr. Marco Kaltofen, a nuclear research engineer and a Hanford expert.

Radioactive wastes, however, weren’t the only poisons befouling the site; hazardous chemicals were also a byproduct of Hanford’s weapon operations. “We have mainly acids and caustics, some solvents, trichloroethylene, PCBs, pentachlorophenol, sulfuric acid, chlorine, fluorine, mercury, chromates,” said Carl G. Welty in 1985, who worked as a toxicologist for the DOE’s environmental protection division.

The reactors at Hanford produced not only heaps of radioactive garbage but also truckloads of nasty chemicals used in the reprocessing of spent fuel rods. The compounds were used to dissolve radioactive materials, and mephitic chemical baths were administered to purify the uranium that made its way into the atomic bomb. These processes left behind other toxins as well: magnesium, acidic waste, and lethal levels of mercury. Much of the waste byproducts from these chemicals, averaging 34,000 tons tons (68 million pounds) per year during the 1970s and 1980s, were hauled off for disposal hundreds of miles from Hanford. But plenty was left behind, having leached into the ground from makeshift lagoons and outdoor trenches, and contaminating upward of six thousand acres. The volume of waste was probably larger, and the danger greater, than the 68-million annual pounds officially reported.

Trench radioactive waste

By the mid-1980s, 120 trenches, or “cribs,” were filled with hundreds of millions of gallons of low-level radioactive fluid pumped in through perforated pipes. These gravel-filled trenches, Hanford operators argued, filtered the liquid before it reached delicate groundwater supplies. Since rainfall is minimal in the region, a mere seven inches a year, Hanford managers believed the lack of moisture would ensure that radioactive particles would never pose a danger. However, opponents, who included state and other federal agencies, countered that the trenches were absolutely a hazard, as the cribs sat only 250 feet above fresh aquifers that fed the Columbia River. The problem was not the amount of rainfall but the hundreds of millions of gallons of liquid piling up, which, opponents argued, would eventually drive the radioactivity downward toward the aquifers and ultimately into the Columbia.

George Toombs, a well-regarded physicist at the Oregon Health Division who studied radioactivity in the Columbia, warned that a radioactive overflow from one of these small hills could destroy large sections of the river and many of its species. Yet like so many other warnings, Toombs’s was shrugged off as doomsday alarmism by Hanford administrators.

In March 2017, a failure took place at one of Hanford’s underground tunnels. It was a reminder that Hanford has many other potential problems besides tank waste hazards. The dirt-and-wood tunnel gave in, leaving a gaping 400-square-foot hole. How surprising was the accident, which forced thousands of workers to find safety? Not very, according to a report uncovered by the Seattle-based advocacy group Hanford Challenge. In 1991, Westinghouse Hanford Company had requested that Los Alamos Technical Associates, Inc. (LATA), evaluate the structural integrity of PUREX Storage Tunnel #1, where the 2017 collapse would occur. The 1991 study of the tunnel indicated a low probability of any degradation of the pressure-treated timber in the tunnel, the report noting that the “only structural degradation that is occurring is due to the continued exposure of the timbers to the high gamma radiation field in the tunnel.

“How can waste be left in a tunnel? Whose idea was that?” asks Rod Ewing, a Stanford University nuclear security researcher.

After the 2017 tunnel collapse, the DOE said there were no signs of a radioactive release and opted to fill the hole with 50 truckloads of dirt and a plastic cover. The question remains if this strategy will stop more collapses that could have far more dangerous impacts. According to Doug Shoop, manager of the DOE Richland Operations Office, the answer is no. “There is potential for more collapse,” says Shoop.

A GAO report released in January 2020, which inspected the tunnel collapse and the DOE’s response, scolded the agency for not doing enough to prevent failures from occurring. The GAO accused the DOE of avoiding finding out what had caused the collapse to begin with. The report indicated that if the DOE had performed a thorough analysis, the tunnel collapse might have been prevented.

While tank waste is often the focus at Hanford, another facility at the site, called the Waste Encapsulation Storage Facility (WESF), holds nearly 2,000 capsules full of radioactive cesium and strontium, floating in liquid pools. There are fears they could break open during a seismic event, releasing a cloud of radioactivity that could blanket the entire region. The plan (delayed due to loss of funding under the Trump administration) is to relocate these capsules into dry storage by 2025. Critics say that’s too long to wait and that the technology exists now to move them

Like other safety concerns at Hanford, problems aren’t often addressed until after the fact. The tunnel collapse cost $10 million to repair. These types of mistakes are part of the greater problem facing the future of Hanford: the work that needs to be done is profitable. Accidents, too, even catastrophic ones, are profitable, and very few people are keeping tabs on the government, its contractors, and the workforce carrying out these precarious tasks. Largely because of its location, as well as the government’s reluctance and inability to grapple with the enormity of the problem, Hanford remains the most complex environmental mess in the United States.

The question is, can it be contained so as to not pose a danger in the future? Can safety improve for workers? Could all that tank waste (525 million gallons), all that toxic buried solid waste (25 million cubic feet), all the leaked and released waste (over 300,000 short tons), and all that discharged liquid (450 billion gallons) ravage the entire region, if not the country, if an accident occurred?

Hanford’s sister city, in Chelyabinsk Russia

An accident there forced around 10,000 people, mostly peasants, to leave their pets and possessions behind. Farmers were instructed to slaughter their cows, destroy fertile farmland, and kill off their crops. Their livelihoods and way of life were destroyed, and no reason was given as to why they had to take such rapid drastic measures. Little did they know that a nuclear accident, the largest in history, had taken place at Hanford’s sister facility in Russia, known as Mayak Chemical Combine. Conceived during the same period as Hanford, Mayak was constructed in 1946 and helped procure the Soviets’ first atomic bomb, in 1949, under Stalin. Like virtually all of Russia’s nuclear projects during the Soviet era, and just like the United States’ Manhattan Project, Mayak was built and operated in total secret and with outright disregard for local communities and ecology.

“Starting in the late 1940s, the Russians released a great deal of radioactive waste into the waterways near Mayak, including lakes, streams, ponds, and reservoirs,” recalls Don Bradley, author of Behind the Nuclear Curtain: Radioactive Waste Management in the Former Soviet Union. “For many years, radioactive effluent at Mayak was released directly into the Techa River, a major source of water for 24 villages along its banks.” Every one of these villages, Bradley notes, no longer exist. All residents were evacuated years ago. Mayak no longer makes plutonium, but the facility is still operational and serves as a reprocessing site for spent nuclear fuel. The practice of reprocessing spent fuel was banned in the United States in 1977 by president Jimmy Carter. His administration believed doing away with spent fuel reprocessing was an important step in reducing nuclear weapons proliferation.

“The Soviets started dumping waste from reprocessed plutonium into Karachay in the early 1950s, and extreme levels of radiation are still being monitored there.” In fact, an isolated corner of the lake was at one time so chock-full of radioactive particles that human survival after a mere 30 minutes of exposure was fifty-fifty. Over 120 million curies of radioactive waste polluted the body of water.

The lake has the potential to dry up during the hotter summer months, leaving open the possibility that the wind could carry radioactive dust across the region. This happened in 1967 when low snowfall resulted in a drastic decline in Lake Karachay’s water levels, producing something of a nuclear summer. Wind currents blew particles from the toxic lake bed across an 1,800 square mile stretch of Chelyabinsk, contaminating upward of a half a million unwitting people. To this day, little is known about what impact the windblown particles had on the health of people or the land.  Workers have placed large concrete blocks and stones on the lakebed to keep the dust at bay. There’s no easy solution, of course, and this rudimentary fix could spawn another problem. “The stones help prevent the dust, but the weight also presses the sediments down and moves them closer to the groundwater,

Like the tank waste at Hanford, Mayak instituted a cooling system early on that continually kept its hot nuclear waste from reaching a critical point. But the waste in a holding cistern buried 20 feet down began to heat up fast. The system had failed, but nobody knew what was happening until it was far too late. As the radioactive slop reached 350 degrees Celsius, its 160-ton concrete lid began to tremble, and finally blew. The cistern and the 80 tons of boiling gunk inside exploded in a volcanic eruption filled with radioactive steam and soot a half mile into the air. The black cloud darkened the sky, spreading 20 million curies of blistering atomic particles across 52,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of West Virginia, and contaminating the homes of an estimated 270,000 people. The blast was measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale, placing the Kyshtym disaster behind Chernobyl and Fukushima (both Level 7s) as the third-most significant nuclear disaster ever. It is certainly the least well known.  Radiation doesn’t always have an immediate impact. It can take weeks, months, or even years to make itself known.

Though kept a secret by the Soviets, the Kyshtym nuclear accident was discovered by the CIA a few years after the fact through a network of spies and on-the-ground informants, along with aerial photographs of the wreckage. In May 1960, U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down by Soviet Air Defense Forces as he was attempting to capture high-altitude photographs of the devastation at the Mayak site. Powers was captured and sentenced to three years for espionage, and in 1962 was exchanged for Soviet officer Rudolf Abel.

It wasn’t until 1978, after the Critical Mass Energy Project acquired 14 heavily redacted documents, that the CIA admitted they had known about the Mayak disaster all along. Like the Soviets, the United States government kept what they had learned a secret and did not share what they knew with the public—not only to protect their sources but also, critics argued, in order to avoid raising concern about the United States’ own nuclear program, and in particular operations at Hanford.

According to one estimate by the Soviet Health Ministry in Chelyabinsk, the ultimate death toll caused by the Mayak explosion was 8,015 people over a 32-year period.

Keeping the war machine running meant putting a positive spin on nuclear technology, from weapons to nuclear energy.  The mythical capabilities of atomic energy continue to permeate debates today about combating climate change and challenging our fossil fuel addiction.

In the meantime, there’s still a very real threat facing the United States, and it’s bubbling in Hanford’s ancient tanks—tanks just like the one that blew at Mayak over 60 years ago.

Alexander’s research in Russia caused him to worry about tank safety issues at Hanford, in particular the potential for a hydrogen explosion. In 1993, a “burping” tank at Hanford was emitting large amounts of hydrogen until it was stabilized by an innovative mixer pump. “This hydrogen, if ignited, could have led to a tank explosion with consequences similar to that of Mayak’s,” warned Alexander. “There is no way of guaranteeing that such a gas release will never happen again even in the newly constructed Waste Treatment facilities. It’s not just Alexander who became concerned about a Mayak-like accident at Hanford. Even the Oregon Department of Energy noted that the tanks are a ticking time bomb: “A fire or other accident involving Hanford’s contaminated facilities or underground waste tanks could cause an airborne release of radioactive materials,” they wrote in 2007.

The Columbia River, the lifeblood of more than 10,000 farmers and dozens of commercial fisheries in the Pacific Northwest, would certainly be contaminated. Depending on wind patterns, an atomic plume would immediately impact millions of residents across multiple states. Places like Walla Walla, Washington, and Boise, Idaho, would be forever changed. Even if they weren’t immediately impacted, no family would choose to raise a family in a city that boasted high levels of radioactivity. Towns close to Hanford, like Richland, would be forced to evacuate, becoming ghost towns overnight. The entire economy of the Pacific Northwest would be crushed, in turn triggering a market crash that would spread across the globe.

Hanford is a solid case proving that capitalism, and an almost religious devotion to private industry contracts, is not the best remedy to environmental disasters. Government contracting to private companies, also known as the “federal procurement system,” was shaped and solidified by the United States’ growing military apparatus. During the Revolutionary War, the Continental Congress streamlined the government’s contracting process so that supplies would quickly reach the Continental Army. The government at the time was intent not to rely on foreign countries to provide the United States with war goods and materials, believing it was a potential liability. In other words, it was crucial to the budding empire that its weapons were manufactured on US soil and not by its adversaries across the pond. By 1775, the government in Washington appointed the country’s first Quartermaster General and Commissary General, who together worked to “buy, store, transport, and distribute needed goods” for the army. These roles quickly evolved, and the system by which the US government provided goods to its servicemen expanded. By 1789, the Departments of War and Treasury were founded, and by 1798, the US War and Navy Departments became authorized to make all purchases from private industry directly, where the lowest bidder was more often than not the recipient of these government contracts.

Lack of accountability with government contracts is not new to the gargantuan Hanford cleanup. It’s a centuries-old problem. Janet A. McDonnell writes, in “A History of Defense Contract Administration,” that during the War of 1812 there was a total lack of accountability when it came to the government’s procurement process. While some conditions improved by 1860, the Civil War brought more chaos and scandal. The war had expanded at such a rapid clip that supply officers in the field had to keep up by purchasing goods on the open market. Congress, in an attempt to rein in misconduct and government waste, enacted legislation to curb this abuse, but the efforts were futile as there was little to no enforcement of the new law.

Very early on, procuring government contracts while building up US military power was a lucrative business. This traditional government procurement was not unique, as it had existed in Europe for centuries. Yet it took the US government and its free-market ethos to make the bidding a competitive, profit-dependent process. Laws were eventually passed allowing the US government to unilaterally end agreements once the war ceased, but even canceled contracts left taxpayers on the hook for ensuring the companies would see the remainder of their contracts paid in full. In other words, the system was rigged from the start, and taxpayers paid the price.

It was the United States’ commitment to World War II that turned this for-profit military enterprise into a robust economy unlike anything that had existed before. In 1941, the War Department, with Congress’s blessing, allocated $36 billion to fight the war. It was more than the army and navy had spent on the entire World War I, a staggering amount, as the US would end up spending $4.1 trillion in today’s dollars on its war efforts. “If you are going to try to go to war, or to prepare for war, in a capitalistic country, you have got to let business make money out of the process or business won’t work,” said secretary of war Henry Stimson. By all accounts, it was a blood-soaked, greed-based system and still is. Capitalism and war go hand in hand, and nothing encapsulated this flourishing wartime economy and the budding military-industrial complex more than the creation of Hanford.

The term ‘permanent war economy’ is attributed to Charles Wilson, CEO of GE, who warned at the end of World War II that the US must not return to a civilian economy, but must keep to a ‘permanent war economy’ of the kind that was so successful during the war: a semi-command economy, run mostly by corporate executives, geared to military production,” explains Noam Chomsky. “After World War II, most economists and business leaders expected that the economy would sink back to depression without massive government intervention of the kind that, during the war years, finally overcame the Great Depression. The New Deal had softened the edges, but not much more … the ‘permanent war economy’ has an economic as well as a purely military function.

Seventeen million jobs were created through the war economy, ultimately lifting the country out of the Great Depression. Industry output also grew at a pace never seen before in US history. One-third of the entire US economy was devoted to the war effort. Wages rose. Corporate taxes increased, as did corporate profits. Manufacturing saw one of the largest boons, with salaries jumping by 50%. Union ranks filled. Black people entered sectors of the workforce for the first time and employment was higher than ever. Though these gains weren’t equally spread throughout society, they translated to high support for the war even as deaths of US troops mounted abroad.

Despite the New Deal, even President Roosevelt had been constrained from intervening massively enough to stimulate a full recovery. By 1938 he had lost his working majority in Congress, and a conservative coalition was back, stifling the New Deal programs. When the economy had begun to bounce back, FDR pulled back on government spending to balance the budget, which contributed to the recession of 1938. The war was like a wave coming over that conservative coalition; the old ideological constraints collapsed and government outlays powered a recovery.

It wasn’t just the fact that the war improved upon the economic efforts of the New Deal, it also was the first time the US government was the main purchaser of US goods produced by US workers. It was a truly astounding change. One-half of every single good manufactured in the United States was later purchased, or contracted to be made in the first place, by the US government, which quickly became deeply intertwined with labor, a concept never before experienced in the US economy. Sadly, this expansion and transformation of economic life materialized due to the United States’ commitment to World War II and not from a grand socialist experiment.

Government and private capital had never before experienced such a tumultuous relationship. The government seized control of corporations. In 1944, FDR took control of Montgomery Ward after a thundering labor dispute. It was the fourth year of the war, and there was no end in sight. Companies like Montgomery Ward had been producing items that the government deemed war essentials. Two years prior, the National War Labor Board was created to deal with labor disputes during the period, along with other issues that arose from this drastic economic reconfiguration. In the case of Montgomery Ward, which was one of the largest department stores in the country, they were forced to make items like clothing, auto parts, and farm equipment.

FDR’s infamous no-strike pledges were in place to block these types of labor uprisings. “The Government of the United States cannot and will not tolerate any interference with war production in this critical hour,” said FDR following the seizure.

It’s a fascinating tale. It is also instructive as to how the economy of World War II completely, if only temporarily, reshaped US industry. Some on the right look at this era and see the private sector as the true engine of ingenuity. Others on the left view the economics of World War II as solely a destructive, evil force. It was more complex and nuanced, argues left historian Mark R. Wilson in his 2016 book, Destructive Creation: American Business and the Winning of World War II.

Had the labor movement been less divided and had the Roosevelt administration been more unified and disciplined when it came to public relations, more Americans might have heard messages that touted the crucial contributions of public institutions—military as well as civilian—to the nation’s victory in the war of production. But during World War II, the business community was more unified and energetic

Over 56,000 acres were seized under eminent domain in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and would be used to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb. Some 54,000 acres in Los Alamos, New Mexico, home to Project Y, were chosen due to their remote location, and were used by University of California researchers and engineers to design and build an atomic bomb. In Washington, Hanford’s 40,000 acres were picked for their remoteness and access to water for the similar job of producing plutonium, which was undertaken by DuPont.

There was concern that Oak Ridge was located too close to Knoxville and was at risk of killing Americans if there was an explosive accident. As a result, Hanford was chosen as an additional location for the nation’s plutonium production. Lastly, a scientific laboratory was erected at the University of Chicago and later relocated to Red Gates Woods in Cook County, Illinois, where the world’s first nuclear reactor was built, in May 1944. Even at the Manhattan Project’s inception, there was concern that something could go wrong, endangering the lives of US citizens in the government’s quest to perfect this novel nuclear technology.

On average, each nuclear bomb used in the war cost $5 billion to develop. The United States produced four and detonated three: Gadget (New Mexico test), Little Boy (Hiroshima) and Fat Man (Nagasaki). Bomb number four, which was made and at the ready, was never utilized.

The  U.S. only escalated its allocation of tax dollars toward building its nuclear arsenal after the war ended. From 1945 to 1990, the United States went all in, developing over 70,000 nuclear bombs and warheads during the Cold War. It was a booming business, and Hanford was operating at full throttle. In total, the site produced 103.5 metric tons of plutonium. Meanwhile, sites in Kentucky, Ohio, and Tennessee produced 745.3 metric tons of uranium. The government also had to test the goods. In all, 1,030 nuclear arms tests were conducted by the US military and its contractors, 215 in the air and 815 underground from 1945 to September 1992. The accounting is stunning. Nuclear weapons made up almost 30 percent of all military spending from 1940 to 1996, $5.5 trillion of an $18.7 trillion total.

Despite the trillions of dollars that poured into nuclear weapons development, the United States did very little to prepare for their aftermath. Not the aftermath of dropping nuclear bombs on innocent civilians in Japan but the aftermath of producing these nukes with their inevitable byproduct, radioactive waste. At Hanford, the quest to make nuclear fuel outpaced any plans to keep the waste safe from humans and the fragile environment around the site.

It’s no wonder that as nuclear production began to slow, a new industry, that of a massive cleanup project, took shape. There has been progress in cleaning up some polluted groundwater, for example, in an area that once spanned 120 square miles, which is now down to 60.

The DOE’s reliance on private contractors to get the job done, the immense profit incentive for these large companies to rush to meet deadlines, the lack of government expertise and oversight, and the secrecy often surrounding the cleanup all create more problems than they fix.

Take the case of tank waste. For 30 years, scientists, some employed by the DOE and most by various contractors, have attempted to figure out how best to deal with all the waste sitting there in underground tanks. They still aren’t sure how best to do it. As of 2020, the plan is to have the tanks cleaned by 2080, at a cost of $550 billion.  Even with a deadline so far in the future, nobody working on the project and no contractor carrying out the work can say for sure if this will ever be achieved. Nor can they promise that the price to taxpayers won’t continue to balloon.

Nothing embodies the magnitude of these bumbling failures at Hanford more than the Waste Treatment Plant (WTP), commonly known as the vitrification or “vit” plant. The plant’s construction began in 2002 and was to be completed by 2011. That didn’t happen. The earliest that WTP may be fully operational is 2036, and even that is unlikely given the current state of affairs.

By any honest accounting, Bechtel has failed on numerous occasions yet continues to operate with little public scrutiny. It is the benefactor of a federal contracting bonanza that keeps the floodgates of taxpayer funding open. Bechtel’s WTP contract, like many of those doled out at Hanford and devised by Bechtel in its previous government contracts, is what is known in contractor parlance as “cost and schedule performance based.” It’s an arrangement that all but guarantees a profit, no matter if the job is done right or not at all. Such contracts, now standard in the defense world, reward contractors like Bechtel for “meeting milestones” within their proposed budget—in some instances, even if plans and construction turn out to be critically flawed. Despite blatant mistakes, including those made during the first three years of building the WTP with seismic deficiencies, Bechtel boasted in 2004 that they had received 100% of the available milestone fees available to the company through their Hanford contract with DOE.

Since 2000, Bechtel has held the rights to build WTP. The plant, like Bechtel’s Hanford contract, is gargantuan. The equivalent of constructing two full-scale nuclear power plants, WTP is to one day span 65 acres and include four major nuclear facilities: Pre-treatment, Low-Activity Waste Vitrification, High-Level Waste Vitrification, and the Analytical Laboratory. It’s currently the largest single construction operation taking place anywhere in the United States. Not only is the proposed WTP immense, it also comes with a staggering price tag of $41 billion, funded solely by the public trust, part of which comes out of the annual DOE budget.

Before Bechtel, the DOE’s WTP contract was with British Nuclear Fuel Ltd (BNFL). But in May 2000, after the company estimated they would spend more than $14 billion—despite an earlier cost estimate of $7 billion—the DOE ended the contract. Bechtel was then awarded the job through a competitive contract bid, receiving a $4.3 billion deal when it assured the DOE it could do the work for less than BNFL’s price tag. Since then however, the company’s cost estimates, start dates, and deadlines have changed frequently.

Once operable, WTP is intended to turn the millions of gallons of radioactive sediment currently in Hanford’s waste tanks into glass rods by combining the toxic gunk with glass-forming material at a blistering 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit in a process called vitrification. Even by the rosiest estimates, the job won’t be finished until 2047.

After Bechtel’s botched reconstruction efforts in Iraq, a number of engineers and scientists began to wonder why Bechtel wasn’t coming under similar congressional scrutiny for its even larger deal to build the WTP. This is not to say there are not well intentioned and bright people working at Hanford. The problem is that they are often tied up in a bureaucratic, profit-driven nightmare. This is also not to say the DOE doesn’t know Bechtel is a never-ending problem. In 2018, the department released a letter lambasting the company for quality and design problems resulting in “potentially unrecoverable quality issues” and “a lack of corrective actions” in regard to the company’s work on WTP. Bechtel was doing shoddy work and the DOE called them on it.

In 2012, DOE official Gary Brunson released a memo listing 34 reasons why Bechtel National Inc. is not competent to complete their role as the Design Authority for the WTP.  So how does Bechtel get away with it? From 2019 to 2020, the company spent $1.8 million on lobbying efforts in Washington, DC, and they were keen to cover their bases on both sides of the aisle. Both Republicans and Democrats were on the receiving end: $32,734 to Trump, $51,795 to Biden and even a little $10,943 donation to Bernie Sanders. They also covered their assets locally, writing a $14,050 check to Republican Dan Newhouse, a US representative serving the tri-city area of Washington State, where Hanford is located. Additionally, Bechtel ponied up $10,051 for US Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, whose district encompasses the majority of southwest Washington State along the Columbia River. In the case of its donations to Representatives Newhouse, they seem to be paying off handsomely, and he keeps his mouth shut about Bechtel’s numerous flops.

Newhouse, like Bechtel, has become an ardent supporter of former US president Donald Trump’s reclassification of much of Hanford’s nuclear waste as “low-level.” This opens up the possibility that much of the waste sitting in Hanford’s tanks will never actually be treated, exactly what Bechtel desires. Such a reclassification would allow the federal government and its contractors to forget about cleaning up the majority of Hanford’s tank waste. This new “Class C low-level radioactive waste” designation would retool the entire cleanup, letting Bechtel off the hook for failing to properly build the long-overdue Waste Treatment Plant.

Bechtel’s profitable and sordid history

Bechtel has a string of bungled jobs under its belt, some of which have been deadly. In 2006, an underground highway constructed by Bechtel during Boston’s “Big Dig” collapsed. An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) into the incident found Bechtel and its subcontractors at fault, pointing out that the company should have known the epoxy glue they used to hold bolts into ceiling panels would eventually fail. NTSB found that the tragedy was preventable and Bechtel had been negligent. The deadly incident followed years of budget increases, deadline lapses, and complaints that construction of the labyrinthine road system beneath Boston’s historic district was of poor quality. In a settlement with the State of Massachusetts, Bechtel agreed to pay $357.1 million in damages, which excused them from any criminal wrongdoing.

The company’s influence goes deep, of course, evidenced by its integral role in US imperialist projects in the Middle East and elsewhere. In addition to its botched projects in war-torn Iraq, Bechtel has followed US military operations, covert and otherwise, from Yemen to Syria, Iran, Palestine, Lebanon, and Libya. In the case of Syria, it’s accused of playing a significant role in the CIA-backed coup of 1949, while also providing its services to the CIA’s Operation Ajax, which orchestrated the 1953 Iranian coup. Bechtel turned a profit in the ensuing years by using covert information provided by its contacts within the US intelligence establishment. Wherever the CIA carried out its agenda, Bechtel often trailed closely behind, raking in the spoils. When it wasn’t cashing in on the wreckage of the US government abroad, the company was busy on the home front, working on country’s secretive nuclear program and the infrastructure that was required to maintain it. The relationship between Bechtel and its government benefactors has been a deep and bloody one.

By 2013, Bechtel had become the fourth-largest privately held company in the United States, and with that rise came the power to influence Washington at will. If you thought this dynamic might change with Joe Biden’s election, think again. Bechtel plans to benefit handsomely from Biden’s infrastructure plan, for which the company lobbied publicly.

“The Bechtel story is most important for how the company embodied the rise of a corporate capitalism forged in the American West that over the decades took the world by storm —a capitalism much more in line with cronyism than free market ideology,” writes journalist and author Sally Denton in The Profiteers: Bechtel and the Men Who Built the World. “Bechtel pioneered the revolving door system that now pervades both US politics and the American economic system—a door that came to shape foreign policy not always in the interest of the nation and its citizens, but for the interests of multinational corporations.

Bechtel’s influence in Washington has become more of a conveyor belt than a revolving door. Former defense secretary Caspar W. Weinberger, who served in the Nixon and Reagan cabinets and was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, is a former vice president of Bechtel. Daniel Chao, previously president of Bechtel China, was an advisor of the United States’ Export-Import Bank, a federal government business that “assists in financing and facilitating US exports of goods and services.” Jack Sheehan, a retired Marine Corps general and former supreme allied commander for NATO, later cashed in at Bechtel as senior vice president for Europe, Africa, Middle East, and Southwest Asia. Ross J. Connelly, a former executive vice president for Bechtel, was appointed by president George W. Bush to serve on the Board of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, a US-backed finance and development institution that directly helps US corporations like Bechtel with overseas ventures. Donald Rumsfeld, acting as an unauthorized lobbyist for Bechtel, pressed Saddam Hussein in 1983 to allow the company to build an oil pipeline to Jordan. The list goes on and on.

Bechtel’s frequent troubles at Hanford stem from the romantic embrace between these powerful capitalist interests and their friends inside the US government—a long-standing relationship that fosters impunity. Thus, despite the overwhelming evidence Bechtel is failing at its duties at Hanford, there’s no indication its contracts will be torn to shreds any time soon. On the contrary, Bechtel will most certainly sign lucrative deals in the years ahead for an array of government-funded exploits.

The permanent war economy, from Hanford to the Middle East, is not about to fall into a recession anytime soon, especially now that the United States has its sights on China and is intensifying a new arms race in the Indo-Pacific region. The nuclearization of World War II—from the impact “the bomb” had on the land to the profit-driven fraud of the Hanford cleanup—is still being felt.

Whistleblowers

In 1987, the Seattle Times reached out to Bricker for an interview. Later, ABC News picked up the story as well. “It was pretty apparent after I spoke out the first time that I would never be forgiven for what I had done; for taking things out from under the Hanford cloak,” recalled Bricker. Of course, his contractor Rockwell, and later the company’s successor Westinghouse, saw him as a useless troublemaker. Management was not on his side, but Bricker stayed the course, believing he was slowly making a difference. If the public knew about the problems at Hanford, the DOE would have no choice but to fix them.

Questions about Bricker’s mental/psychological fitness began to flare up. He was sent to an array of psychologists in an effort to label him as unfit. In two separate meetings, Bricker was asked, “How do you feel about your fellow workers, your employer, and do certain things tick you off?” They would ask questions like, “How do you feel about your mother? Do you kick the dog?” “I was terribly embarrassed,” Bricker remembers. “It’s humiliating, degrading.” The plot to get rid of him picked up speed after Bricker conducted an interview with the Seattle Times. Bricker told the reporter he was convinced his employer already knew he’d talked to the press, even before any story was even published. Internal memos detailed exactly what transpired.

During Bricker’s tumultuous ordeal, he reached out to Tom Carpenter, then working for the Government Accountability Project. “I would drive out to visit him at his home and we would notice a black van parked near his house. It was everywhere we went,” remembered Carpenter. “We were certain the damn thing was following us, which caused Ed to become pretty paranoid about the situation.” Carpenter was intent on finding out who was behind the mysterious black van that was tailing them, so he filed a subpoena to get a list of all vehicles purchased by Rockwell.

The Department of Labor released a report investigating Bricker’s complaints and divulging Rockwell’s scheme to ruin his career. The report revealed that Rockwell was covertly targeting Bricker in a dirty counteroperation scheme called “Special Item-Mole.” John Spear, the DOL’s special investigator on the Bricker case, spent over a year gathering information, eventually producing four binders worth of discovery. The operation to target Bricker was run by Wit Walker, a veteran air force counterintelligence operative under the direction of Hanford Chief of Security, General Bill Brooksher. Walker and Brooksher had real power at Hanford. Walker was the chief of Hanford’s security, a miniature private mercenary outfit with a police force of 300 officers who had access to machine guns, helicopters, and other counterintelligence equipment. Their mission was to defend Hanford from spies, criminals, and Russian terrorists—anyone they deemed a threat to Hanford’s secrecy. Bricker, a mid-level whistleblower, was the biggest threat to business as usual at Hanford, a business Walker and Brooksher were paid big money to defend.

Jack Manis was a man of habit. A nuclear processor like Bricker, Manis often visited the Bricker family in the evenings and was also tracked to their home by Rockwell’s counterintelligence operation. While both Bricker and Manis were Mormons, Walker had strayed from his faith and had money and marital problems. Like Bricker, Manis was harassed by his superiors. Hanford at the time was still an operating nuclear site. All workers had to pass a psychological evaluation and background checks, but some, like Bricker and Manis, faced more stringent questioning. Manis was grilled about his petty debts, which Rockwell argued made him vulnerable to recruitment by a foreign adversary like the nettlesome Soviets. They also accused Manis of cheating on his wife, a claim he vehemently rejected. Rockwell’s security team responded to his repeated denials by tossing photos on the table in front of him as proof he’d been surveilled, and proof he’d been sleeping around on his wife. It was like a scene from a Hollywood B-movie, but it was earth-shattering. The photos could easily ruin Manis and destroy his marriage.

But there was a way out. What did he know about Ed Bricker, they asked? How well did he know him? What did they talk about all those evenings Manis spent at the Bricker home? If Manis helped them nail the son-of-a-bitch Bricker, they promised, his tribulations would dissipate. It was taxpayer-funded blackmail—do what they demand or pay the price. Reluctantly, Manis signed on to become their mole. His job was simple: spy on his pal, an assignment he carried out judiciously. He took pictures and stole Bricker’s mail and shared details about their conversations and Bricker’s work concerns. These efforts went on for weeks. Manis was a decent informant, but Rockwell wanted more. The problem was, unlike Manis, Bricker was a devout family man. He didn’t booze and gamble. He paid his bills on time. He stayed home at night with his family and went to church services on Sundays. Bricker led a wholesome, seemingly infallible Mormon life.

Rockwell’s goons weren’t having it. They were getting pushy. While Manis had been feeding them information, none of it was very useful, and certainly none of it was enough to send Bricker packing. They needed much more, and ordered Manis to wear a wire and entrap his longtime friend. It was time to raise the stakes. Manis, however, was getting nervous. Snooping on his buddy to bury his own faults was becoming too much to handle. He’d gone along with Rockwell’s scheme for long enough; a wiretap was a line too far. He finally broke down and told Bricker what he’d been up to.

“I was a good, safe employee that followed procedures,” Bricker stated after the report was released. “They didn’t want anybody that followed procedures.”’

ATTEMPTED MURDER: One perilous day while working at Hanford’s Z Plant, Bricker, outfitted in a hazmat suit with an oxygen tank strapped to his back, was tasked with hiking alone into a high-radiation processing canyon for a cleanup reconnaissance. The area was so chock-full of dangerous radioactive particles that workers jokingly referred to it as the “one sniff, you’re stiff” zone.  “While he was down in there, his oxygen regulator came loose,” Carpenter explained to me. “He had to try and hold his breath and get out as fast as possible. It was intentional, they tried to kill him, no doubt about it.

Carpenter believes that the air regulator, which had been fastened by one of Bricker’s coworkers the night before, was attached loosely in an attempt to sabotage him, forcing Bricker to inhale enough radiation that he’d eventually die. When Bricker realized his air canister was failing, he reached for his backup, but it was taped shut. Almost suffocating, Bricker raced out of the canyon as fast as he could, inhaling as little air as possible as he trudged up the side of the steep canyon. When he was finally safe, he fell over, exhausted and out of breath. No criminal investigation followed, and no charges were ever filed.

The exposure, along with other Hanford-related incidents, took a ravenous toll on Bricker’s health. Today, areas on his skin are covered with melanoma, and he has an ongoing battle with chronic pulmonary disease, a lung disorder that includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis—ailments he blames on toxic vapor inhalation and that treacherous day in the polluted canyon.

In 2011, outrage was brewing at Hanford. Some prominent employees working on the project were blowing the whistle over what they believed to be dismissals of internal scientific assessments. They were also concerned about alleged abuses of managerial power that they had called to the attention of the Obama administration, to no avail. The whistleblowers asserted that the DOE lacked the critical expertise to oversee the project, pointing to institutional failures within the DOE and Hanford contractor Bechtel. They also alleged that Bechtel rushed through shoddy design plans to pocket quick cash. The consequences, they argued, not only jeopardized public safety and put the project at risk of failure; they were also likely to cost taxpayers even more money, should fatally flawed construction ultimately require a complete overhaul.

“We need alternatives to the current plan right now,” admitted Alexander, who is now retired but stays involved in Hanford issues. “We need a different design and more options on the table. This appears to be a hard thing for [DOE and Bechtel] management to accept. They have spent years of time and money on a bad design, and it will delay the project even more…. One of the main problems at Hanford is that DOE is understaffed and overtasked. As such, we cannot conduct in-depth reviews of each of the individual systems in the facilities. Therefore there is a high likelihood that several systems will be found to be inoperable or not perform to expectations.

It was damning stuff. Donald Alexander’s whistleblowing, which I first covered in Seattle Weekly, was one of the largest shakeups Hanford and the DOE experienced in the last decade, largely because Alexander was, and remains, well respected among his peers. What made him such a powerful whistleblower, unlike most who came before him, was that he was nearly impossible to silence. Alexander knows his nuclear disasters well; he was part of one of the DOE’s first scientific delegations to Russia’s Mayak nuclear facility in 1990. The same year he spoke to me, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board (DNFSB), an independent organization tasked by the executive branch to oversee public health and safety issues at the DOE’s nuclear facilities, reviewed thirty thousand documents and interviewed forty-five staffers. Their report was devastating

The DNFSB report noted that those who went against the grain and raised concerns about safety issues associated with construction design “were discouraged, if not opposed or rejected without review.” In fact, according to the DNFSB, one of these scientists, Dr. Walter Tamosaitis, was removed from his position as a result of speaking up about design problems. Today, it’s not just the DNFSB that is concerned with the safety and management culture at Hanford. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has released numerous reports detailing the extent to which Hanford contractors have underestimated costs and timelines.

In 2004, GAO dropped a report critical of the DOE and Bechtel’s cleanup plans, warning of faulty design and construction of the Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP), a structure that is still a critical part of the cleanup effort. The report affirmed that the WTP building was not designed to withstand a strong earthquake, but only after prodding from the DNFSB did the DOE force Bechtel to go back to the drawing board to ensure the plant could withstand a quake. As a result, Bechtel’s design and cost estimates to finish construction skyrocketed from $4.3 billion to more than $10 billion overnight. And in 2006, GAO released another paper critical of Bechtel’s timeline and cost estimates, which change almost yearly, saying they have “continuing concerns about the current strategy for going forward”.

Various flawed design plans have flown under the radar because the DOE did not have enough staff to thoroughly review every design piece put forth by Bechtel, Alexander told me. It’s a problem that persists to this day. As a result, expensive mistakes like these will no doubt occur again.

GLASS ROD STORAGE

Once operable, the plant is to turn the millions of gallons of radioactive sediment currently in Hanford’s waste tanks into glass rods by combining the toxic gunk with glass-forming material. The rods will then be shipped to an offsite location to be stored indefinitely. The DOE is tasked with overseeing the project and signing off on their recommended procedures, but the agency is incapable of proper oversight. “In the past 45 years, about 400,000 people … have been irradiated [because of the Mayak disaster],” reflected Alexander. “It’s quite possible that a similar accident could happen here. That’s why it is so important that we get the Hanford cleanup facilities up and running properly, as soon as possible.

These five large containers hold “pulse jet mixers” designed to mix radioactive waste within the vessels when the plant is finally operable. Alexander first explained that if these materials cannot stay consistently mixed, WTP would never be able to turn the radioactive waste into glass rods.

McNulty was also concerned that Bechtel and DOE management consistently ignored sound science, moving forward with a project that failed small-scale testing on numerous occasions. The tests showed that solids ended up accumulating into small piles, causing the mixers to malfunction. The substances that built up during the mixing process, these studies noted, were far denser and more cohesive than originally thought. Consequently, the mixers would likely fail. If these small-scale studies proved correct, and the pulse jet mixers start mixing waste, it could cause a radioactive accident. Perhaps even more frighteningly, as Alexander pointed out, is that these same tests show that erosion will likely occur in the so-called “black cells”—the areas around the vessels that house the pulse jet mixers. These areas would become off-limits to maintenance crews once the vessels begin to operate, like a radioactive coffin surrounded by cement.

“A significant risk is that the vessel bottoms could be eroded through,” a distressed Alexander explained. “If the pulse jet mixers erode the vessel floor, then the radioactive contents of the vessel will drain into the black cell that they are entombed in. Because there is no access for men or equipment into black cells, there is no way of providing maintenance within them. The black cell itself would likely have to be abandoned. McNulty was worried that there would be no turning back once the vessels became operable because the radioactivity within them would be too high for workers to enter—meaning that the black cells’ mechanisms, from the vessels to the piping, would have to last the lifetime of the machine. Any malfunction of any part would end the vessel operation altogether, creating a potentially deadly nuclear accident.

Alexander’s tests of the pulse jet mixer design plans showed that the model was faulty, yet his pleas to stop construction went unheeded by his DOE project director, In early August 2011, the DOE announced that it was moving forward with welding the tops on the vessels, much to Alexander’s dismay. He wrote DOE’s chief of nuclear safety, Richard Lagdon: “Unfortunately the decision to weld the Non-Newtonian vessels was made a day too soon. Based on the testing yesterday evening and the recent testing results it is clear that the decision to weld will require rework and place unacceptable liability upon the government…. I was the only scientist present to observe these tests. I guess the project doesn’t really care about the test results. Testing over the last two weeks demonstrates that we are now at the point where a very expensive contingency option will have to be exercised. This involves either the implementation of design and fabrication of a new vessel or significant modification of the existing vessel. Either option will be extremely costly…. This could have been avoided if the DOE technical staff recommendations and those of the DNFSB (among numerous others) had been fairly considered.”

“It’s a classic case of management overriding technical staff,” asserted McNulty, who spoke from years of experience working at Hanford. “The DOE is in a state of absolute denial about this whole thing. They need to rein Russo in. They can’t allow him to continue to misrepresent all the internal studies that show the pulse jet mixers are simply not going to work.

In the fall of 2010, the pulse jet mixers were welded inside the non-Newtonian vessels, but the tops were not sealed shut. Despite opposition from Alexander and other scientists, this portion of the project was pushed forward by Bechtel and DOE management. “I raised issues within DOE, but Bechtel was convinced these pulse jet mixers would work,” Alexander claimed. “The result was that Bechtel was able to get DOE management to sign off on welding the mixers within the vessels. Once the weld heads encapsulate what studies show to be defective pulse jet mixers, years of research and development will be wasted and billions more will have to be spent to fix what could have been prevented.

Tamosaitis was removed from the project. “The drive to stay on schedule is putting the whole WTP project at risk,” Tamosaitis told me. “‘Not on my watch’ is a standard mantra among DOE and contract management who like to intimidate naysayers like me. These guys would rather deal with major issues down the road than fix them up front…. Cost and schedule performance trump sound science time and again. In 2011, Tamosaitis sued Bechtel in Washington State, as well as URS and the DOE at the federal level over his ousting at Hanford. “It is my opinion that [Dale] Knutson and Frank Russo are in lockstep,” he asserted. “Due to the constant managerial turnover [on the WTP project], these guys won’t likely be there in a few years, so they’d rather have these problems happen on someone else’s clock, even though it is always more expensive to fix something later then to do it right the first time.

The vessels are one day to be the first stop for Hanford’s tank waste once it enters the site’s pretreatment facility. Already, over 13 years behind schedule and billions of dollars over its initial budget, the vessels still aren’t finished. If these $100 million vessels have to be rebuilt, the costs will skyrocket.

The DOE retaliated and filed a motion to delay certain evidentiary aspects of Tamosaitis’ case from being allowed in future court proceedings. Soon after, Tamosaitis testified in front of the US Senate’s Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee. At the hearing, he explained how he was removed from his job and forced to work in an offsite windowless basement office as a warning of sorts to others who were contemplating speaking out. Tamosaitis set off a minor earthquake at Hanford. Following his lead, two veteran Hanford scientists spoke to me about their experiences with the saga, exposing blatant corruption and mismanagement at Hanford’s WTP. With these endeavors, they claimed, DOE management was not only complicit but also took direct actions to hide glaring technical problems from the public—problems that could lead to a catastrophic nuclear accident.

“The pursuit to stay on schedule has crippled the entire operation,” Bruce told me of the WTP. “This sucker is not going to run as currently designed, plain and simple, and a heck of a lot of people around here know it but are too afraid to speak up.” In 2011, Bruce decided he’d had enough. He was aware of glaring technical flaws, such as problems in the mixing design that could lead to lethal leaks at the WTP and prevent it from ever running properly. These problems had not yet been addressed.

An ad hoc group was formed, with Bruce and Thorson on one team and another set of engineers from Bechtel and URS on another. The two pursued a fix for the buildup of precipitation, which became known as the Equipment Option, while the other group developed an alternative Operating Solution. The Equipment Option was projected to take five fewer years to process Hanford’s nuclear waste into glass. At an operating cost of roughly $1 billion per year, that meant a $5 billion savings for taxpayers. The Operating Solution, on the other hand, would temporarily fix the issue, but provide less reliability and less flexibility, plus it would increase the amount of time needed to process nuclear waste. More important to Bechtel, however: The Operating Solution would cost less in construction dollars to implement.

“Bechtel knew darn well DOE would not pick the Operating Solution, and would go with the Equipment Option,” Tamosaitis continued. “But they pursued this approach anyway, so that DOE would ultimately cover the cost”—because, according to their contract, if the DOE picked a more expensive solution to a problem, they, rather than Bechtel, had to cover the costs by adding funds to Bechtel’s baseline budget. “Bechtel is the best at playing the game of getting the most taxpayer money to address technical issues that are their responsibility,” said Tamosaitis. “They wait for DOE to give them more money. This maximizes their profits at taxpayer expense. If they don’t get the money, they just move on. It’s the only business where not doing it well leads to more profits—all of which is taxpayer money.

Thorson’s accomplishments at the WTP are well-documented. From 2002 to 2008, he led a highly successful effort that resulted in changing the type of resin used in the WTPs ion-exchange columns. This resin acts as a sponge to separate radioactive cesium from the waste, helping to decontaminate Hanford’s radioactive material before it is processed into glass. Bechtel was not supportive of Thorson’s efforts, however, because more than $11 million worth of research and testing was required to develop and qualify the resin, despite its potential long-term savings of billions of dollars. Another resin already existed, and despite all its problems and associated high costs, Bechtel contended it was acceptable, and told Thorson to stop his development effort.

All indications were that the original resin was not going to work—it gummed up the system, potentially causing it to fail. Even so, URS and Bechtel management disagreed with staff recommendations and claimed the resin was fine as it was. The DOE thought otherwise, and the agency’s federal director at the time, John Eschenberg, authorized the group Thorson was working in to move ahead with the new resin development, agreeing to cover the research costs, which were added to Bechtel’s WTP budget. After several years of research and testing, Thorson’s efforts paid off, and his resin was demonstrated to be a tremendous success. The new resin was substantially less expensive than the original resin. When all is said and done, Thorson’s resin will have saved taxpayers at least $3 billion.

By the late 1970s, Hanford and Yucca Mountain were the two prime contenders to become depots for spent nuclear fuel. While the Western Shoshone stood their ground and tried to fight the use of Yucca as a repository, they ultimately lost. Jim, representing Yakama Nation, took the lead on keeping the stuff out of Hanford. The waste was to sit in man-made tombs for the next 10,000 years. How could it even be done right in the first place? You can’t bury nuclear waste near groundwater supplies; there’s simply no way to keep it from seeping out as the earth shakes, contorts, erodes, and shifts over the course of tens of thousands of years. If water were to ever enter the nuclear-laden cavity, it would likely boil over, causing radioactive lava to spill, or worse, produce a quasi-volcanic eruption. At the very least, Jim argued, the stuff would one day leak, as it had been out of the existing underground tanks for decades. The Columbia River would be impacted. Fish would be impacted. Humans would be impacted,

Bill Gates is even getting in on the fun, starting his own nuclear power company called Natrium, which is Latin for sodium. The first plan for Gates is to build a small and “safe” sodium-cooled reactor in Wyoming. But, critics note, Gates’s atomic dreams will be short-lived. Sodium-cooled nuclear plants have always failed in the past, largely because they are at higher risk of breakout fires, which means a higher risk of accidents. In other words, Gates is wasting his money on a dangerous idea.

Chernobyl

In most cases, Monbiot has been careful to defend his positions with valid supporting evidence, even chastising others for not measuring up to his standards. But to defend his stance on nuclear power, Monbiot is satisfied with cherry-picking scientific facts from the infamous 1986 Chernobyl disaster. “The Chernobyl meltdown was hideous and traumatic. The official death toll so far appears to be 43: 28 workers in the initial few months and 15 civilians by 2005,” wrote Monbiot, who cited the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation as his source. However, even the WHO concluded that about 4,000 people would eventually die as a result of radiation exposure from Chernobyl, a statement Monbiot seemed content with dismissing.

Both the UN and WHO seem to have drastically underestimated the actual human cost of the Chernobyl meltdown. In 2009, the New York Academy of Sciences released the most significant report on the deaths and environmental devastation caused by Chernobyl. After poring through thousands of reports and studies conducted in Eastern Europe and Russia, the academy concluded that nearly one million people have died as a result of radiation exposure from the nuclear disaster (Yablokov 2009). NOTE: this is controversial though, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl:_Consequences_of_the_Catastrophe_for_People_and_the_Environment

NUCLEAR PLANTS IN THE MIDST OF WAR

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine demonstrated, the threat of nuclear war is not solely dependent on the detonation of atomic weapons. Nuclear power plants, when located in contested regions or on active battlefields, also pose a grave risk. If hit by artillery or missile fire, an unforeseen tragedy could quickly unfold. One such frightful scenario nearly occurred as Russian forces shelled the Zaporizhzhia power plant in the southern Ukrainian city of Enerhodar in late February 2022. As blasts occurred around the facility, a fire erupted in a nearby building and was later extinguished. Built between 1980 and 1986, Zaporizhzhia, Europe’s largest nuclear power complex, houses six 950-megawatt reactors, and any battles in or around the plant could lead to a dangerous release of radioactivity.

In all, 15 nuclear facilities were located in the theater of war, where any mishap or intentional attack could have caused an atomic explosion and a subsequent fallout of radioactive particles. Before the bombing started the plants already posed a threat. Ukraine’s aging nuclear plants were designed in the Soviet Union, and in 2021, none met internationally recognized safety standards. The plants were sitting ducks, making for easy targets of military or terror attacks.

Nuclear power facilities require a constant flow of water and electricity to operate, so even a slight disruption could lead to an accident or cataclysmic meltdown. Even at the nearly empty and decaying Chernobyl, electricity is needed to keep its 20,000 spent fuel rods cool.

Shockingly, the plant lost power in early March 2022 as Russia took over the plant and workers were forced to jump start its backup generators to keep the electricity flowing.

Despite the common misconception, atomic energy is not, and has never been, a carbon-free fuel source. Advocates often cite industry-funded PR data claiming that nuke power will reduce CO2 emissions by upwards of 50%. This is blatant misinformation. How is this even possible if nuclear energy itself does not produce CO2 emissions? It’s because there are carbon dioxide emissions at every stage of the nuclear fuel chain. From plant and reactor construction, uranium mining, milling, and fuel fabrication to the transport of waste, emissions aren’t far behind. Physicist Keith Barnham points out that proponents of nuclear power flagrantly ignore this reality and brush aside the fact that uranium mining is extremely carbon intensive. “Nuclear fuel preparation begins with the mining of uranium containing ores, followed by the crushing of the ore then extraction of the uranium from the powdered ore chemically. All three stages take a lot of energy, most of which comes from fossil fuels,” writes Barnham. “The inescapable fact is that the lower the concentration of uranium in the ore, the higher the fossil fuel energy required to extract uranium. Then there’s also the reality that existing uranium mines are nearing the end of their life spans.

This radioactive metal has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, meaning it sticks around for a long, long time, even by geological standards. The largest uranium deposits in the United States are located on the Colorado Plateau, home of the Diné (Navajo) people.31 During the height of the country’s nuclear weapons program, the government extracted 250,000 metric tons of usable uranium from 100 million tons of uranium ore. The mines, which were full of radioactivity, were largely worked by Indigenous Diné. During the height of the country’s uranium craze of the 1970s, there were 12,000 miners in the U.S. and a disproportionate number, upwards of 5,000, were of Diné descent.

Paid very little, at times less than minimum wage, these miners would enter deep uranium shafts and chip away at the walls, often 1,500 feet below the earth’s crust. They filled their wheelbarrows with this uranium ore, all while choking on soot and dust particles. It was dark. There was no ventilation. It was tremendously difficult, perilous work. The water contained high quantities of radon—a radioactive gas emanating from the ore,” writes epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding of the Federal of American Scientists. “Radon decays into heavy, more radiotoxic isotopes called ‘radon daughters,’ which include isotopes of polonium, bismuth, and lead. Radon daughters’ alpha particle emissions are considered to be about 20 times more carcinogenic than x-rays. As they lodge in the respiratory system, especially the deep lung, radon daughters emit energetic ionizing radiation that can damage cells of sensitive internal tissues.

Radon exposure causes lung diseases, the dangers of which were well-known to scientists and the medical community decades prior to World War II. But the Diné and other miners were deemed expendable. Many developed lung cancers as a result; one estimate put the risk at 30 times greater for those who worked the mines as opposed to those who did not. The government later recognized their afflictions, and with the 1990 Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, paid out $100,000 per victim and issued a formal apology. But the damage was done.  In addition to the impact on Diné health, their land, too, was ravaged. Upwards of three billion metric tons of waste was created as a result of uranium extraction on Diné lands, a dizzying amount that continues to poison Native communities throughout the Southwest to this day.

Uranium mines are notoriously poisonous operations, no matter how they are managed or regulated. Heap-leach mining, which uses sulfuric acid and cyanic salts, poisons water supplies. Underground uranium mines produce uranium yellowcake, which often ends up in large, toxic dumps. Surface and open pit mining, often deemed the best method, has plenty of risks aside from the blatant landscape alteration.36 As with utilizing mountaintop removal to extract coal in Appalachia, open pit uranium mines increase erosion and have the potential to kill entire waterways during landslide events. Such an incident occurred in 1979 on Diné land, when a dam broke, flooding the Puerco River near Church Rock, New Mexico with ninety-four million gallons of radioactive waste.37 CO2

Then there’s the issue of what to do with all the waste that atomic energy produces, which is essentially now the problem Hanford is grappling with. The radioactive leftovers have to go somewhere, but they can’t just go anywhere. The Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository, which is currently closed, remains on the shortlist for atomic dump sites.

No energy source that produces a radioactive waste that lasts millennia ought to part of the climate solution.

It was December 2020 and Donald Trump was obsessively lying that the election was stolen when his Department of Energy quietly released a report on the alleged benefits of reclassifying the nation’s high-level radioactive waste.  The DOE argued that upwards of 80% of the hot bubbling waste sitting in Hanford’s leaky tanks should be reclassified as “low-level.” Doing so, they argued, would make the whole Hanford cleanup a hell of a lot easier. If the waste was no longer deemed “high-level” then it could be dealt with in a totally new way, one that would require a lot less money.

The Grout Debacle

The grouting estimate is based on production of cast stone, a durable cementitious grout.” This was not the first time the DOE had talked about turning Hanford’s radioactive waste into a grout-like substance.

The grout program lasted ten years, from 1983 to 1993, and cost taxpayers $200 million which was equal to $450 million in 2021, and a huge waste of money. Over the past 30 years nothing has changed when it comes to grout technology. No real improvements have been made. There have been no leaps in understanding. It remains a plan conjured up by professional contractors and their allies in Washington as a quick fix for the problems plaguing the Hanford cleanup.

Yet nobody actually believes it will be a quick fix, and some argue it will only delay the process that is already underway. “The original grout program failed for insurmountable technical challenges that remain insurmountable today,” watchdog group Hanford Challenge said in response to the DOE’s rehashing of its failed idea. “Without credible solutions to these challenges, it would be a mistake to waste more time and money chasing this mirage.” When the DOE pulled the plug on the grout program in 1993, it was decided that grout would never work. Despite claims that radioactive grout was easy to produce, the reality was that it was nearly impossible.

Then there is the problem of what to do with the stuff once it’s in grout form. In the 1990s, Hanford technicians estimated that a total of 240 vaults would be needed to house the bricks of toxic grout. Each vault would hold upwards of 1.4 million gallons of grout. Those vaults, noted the GAO report, would “contain about as much radioactivity as would be contained in eight canisters produced by the high-level waste vitrification plant.” So what’s the big problem? For starters, the DOE was unable to show that these underground storage encasements would be safe for the environment or human health. So the DOE proposed another bad proposal, which brings us to 2021. The DOE today, like the DOE of the 1980s, is proposing that the tank waste in grout form should be considered “low-level” waste and as such could simply be placed in shallow graves.

This brings us to the next problem, the grout, which would be chock full of radioactive technetium-99 and iodine-129, elements that take a very long time to break down (230,000 and 16 million years, respectively). What the hell could possibly go wrong during that time frame? Erosion and earthquakes, for starters. Anything buried near the surface will be exposed to these alterations, with escalating risks of contaminating groundwater supplies. Radioactive grout won’t be safe for one hundred years, let alone a million.

“The concrete won’t last very long, and these materials are far, far too dangerous to entrust to that form and sitting atop one of the largest freshwater aquifers in the state,” says Tom Carpenter of Hanford Challenge. Even Hanford’s old grout program manager admitted that radioactive particles would eventually leak.

To this day, turning Hanford’s radioactive liquids into glass remains the best option available, and the one that taxpayers have been betting on even if they didn’t realize it.

Such is the state of play at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the most important environmental cleanup in world history takes place with so few paying attention. The costs, both financial and environmental, are too great to leave the job to an understaffed DOE and contractors whose main objective is to keep the profits flowing in. While Trump proposed cutting $760 million in funding for the Hanford cleanup, President Biden also believed too much money was being spent at Hanford, and his 2022 budget moved to slash $105 million. But some argue that the answer isn’t slashing funds, but rather keeping tighter tabs on the money. Ensuring that money is being spent productively is far more pertinent than the budget itself. In other words, it’s about accountability.

A tank is leaking again. In April 2021, the DOE alerted the public that a tank at Hanford was seeping radioactive waste for the second time that year. Not to worry, they advised, we’ve got it all under control. By August 2021, their teams were on to another bleeding tank, one that had gotten so bad they had to come up with a plan to remove its contents so they didn’t experience a major disaster.

These grave situations are not anomalies, nor are they events to be taken lightly. They occur frequently and often in secrecy, far away from cameras, journalists, or government watchdog groups. Indeed, by the time you are reading this, there will likely have been more accidents on the dry plains of Eastern Washington. Maybe the leaks or mishaps will be small, perhaps they will be large in size, but they will happen again, and we can be sure the response will be the same.

If we are to learn anything from Hanford, it’s that nuclear technology, in all its forms, is a clear and present danger to all living things.

The complexities of the project at Hanford are often used as an excuse as to why the public has little understanding of the work.

Bechtel must be removed as the lead contractor. The system must be completely overhauled. There has to be governmental and corporate accountability, more public oversight, and a reckoning with how dire the situation actually is.

Nonprofit organizations like Tom Carpenter’s Hanford Challenge and Hood River, Oregon—based Columbia Riverkeeper, along with Alfrieda Peters of the Yakama Nation, among others, are struggling to bring Hanford out from behind the curtain on to the main stage.

References

Bernton H (2019) Hanford waste-processing plants closer to startup, but questions remain about cleanup. Seattle times

DOE (2022) 2022 Hanford lifecycle scope, schedule & cost report. U.S. Department of Energy  https://www.hanford.gov/files.cfm/2022_LCR_DOE-RL-2021-47_12-27.pdf

Frank J (2022) Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.

NRC (2016) Hanford site disposal facility for waste incidental to reprocessing. U.S. Nuclear regulator commission.

ODE (2017) Frequently asked questions about Hanford. Oregon Department of Energy https://www.oregon.gov/energy/safety-resiliency/Documents/Hanford-FAQs.pdf

Yablokov AV et al (2009) Chernobyl: Consequences of the catastrophe for people and the environment.  New York Academy of Sciences.

 

 

Confessions of a Rogue Nuclear Regulator is one part engrossing memoir and another part seething diatribe, depicting a government agency that routinely caves to industry pressure.

the Fukushima incident revealed what has long been the sad truth about nuclear safety: the nuclear power industry has developed too much control over the NRC and Congress. In the aftermath of the accident, I found myself moving from my role as a scientist impressed by nuclear power to a fierce nuclear safety advocate. I now believe that nuclear power is more hazardous than it is worth. Because the industry relies too much on controlling its own regulation, the continued use of nuclear power will lead to catastrophe in this country or somewhere else in the world. That is a truth we all must confront.

The problem is that with each new accident, all the people in charge of nuclear safety seemed to revert to the belief that this one would be the last one. As chairman of the NRC I battled nearly every day against this instinct to believe the worst was over. You can prepare for the next accident only if you can get all the players to admit that a next one is coming, even if when and where are impossible to predict.