NOTE: Back in October, I wrote a diary (original here, edited version below the :::) regarding an environmental issue that is close to home for my family and me. So I've been especially interested in Obama's environmental pick.
December 2008 LA Times .. With the nomination of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu for Energy secretary, President-elect Barack Obama made sure no one missed the message in the resume.
"His appointment should send a signal to all that my administration will value science," Obama said during a Chicago news conference Monday. "We will make decisions based on facts, and we understand that the facts demand bold action."
Chu, who won his Nobel Prize for developing methods to trap atoms with lasers, has oriented the Berkeley lab to focus on renewable energy and climate change. On Monday he stressed the Energy Department's role in supporting scientists, public and private, and innovations that he said "can transform the entire landscape of energy demand and supply."
Yet even with the Chu pick and the continued rhetoric discussions of clean energy and alternative fuels, there exists a deafening silence regarding waste management and toxic clean up.
Let me get specific.
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I live one hour from the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States. One hour. From the months of May through September my family spends long, hot summer days on the shores of the mighty Columbia River .. just miles from Hanford Nuclear Site.
The Department of Energy describes it this way:
The 586-square-mile Hanford Site is located along the Columbia River in southeastern Washington State. A plutonium production complex with nine nuclear reactors and associated processing facilities, Hanford played a pivotal role in the nation's defense for more than 40 years, beginning in the 1940s with the Manhattan Project.
Physical challenges at the Hanford Site include more than 50 million gallons of high-level liquid waste in 177 underground storage tanks, 2,300 tons (2,100 metric tons) of spent nuclear fuel, 12 tons (11 metric tons) of plutonium in various forms, about 25 million cubic feet (750,000 cubic meters) of buried or stored solid waste, and about 270 billion gallons (a trillion liters) of groundwater contaminated above drinking water standards, spread out over about 80 square miles (208 square kilometers), more than 1,700 waste sites, and about 500 contaminated facilities.
Boating on the Columbia River is by far one my family's favorite outdoor activities in the great Pacific Northwest. This picture was taken last July. We're floating on the reservoir waters near Wanapum State Park created in 1963 by the Wanapum Dam .. part of the Columbia River Basin system of dams.
And these are some of the beautiful beaches of the Columbia River. Beyond the Wanapum Dam lies the Hanford Nuclear Site. Plutonium manufactured at the site was used in the first nuclear bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan. Hanford represents two-thirds of the nation's high-level radioactive waste by volume. Today, Hanford is the most contaminated nuclear site in the United States and is the focus of the nation's largest environmental cleanup. At least one million gallons of radioactive waste has already leaked into the soil and the groundwater that feeds into the Columbia River. Obama admitted he was not familiar with this issue when campaigning in Portland, Oregon back in May 2008.
The Department of Energy puts it into perspective this way:
Physical challenges at the Hanford Site include more than 50 million gallons of high-level liquid waste in 177 underground storage tanks, 2,300 tons (2,100 metric tons) of spent nuclear fuel, 12 tons (11 metric tons) of plutonium in various forms, about 25 million cubic feet (750,000 cubic meters) of buried or stored solid waste, and about 270 billion gallons (a trillion liters) of groundwater contaminated above drinking water standards, spread out over about 80 square miles (208 square kilometers), more than 1,700 waste sites, and about 500 contaminated facilities.
No doubt the issue of nuclear waste is controversial. And complicated. A 1999 archived comment from CounterPunch offers this insight ..
The Department of Energy is not sitting by idly either. Every on the lookout for any opportunity to advance the cause of nuclear power is Dr. Terry Lash, the Energy Department's director of nuclear operations. Alert Nature and Politics readers will recall Lash as the man who has almost single-handedly kept Hanford's Fast Flux Breeder Reactor humming along on "hot standby" until it can once again be fired up to make tritium for H-bombs and, in some distant future, be put to the more humanitarian use of making medical isotopes. To fund the Fast Flux project, Lash has diverted $40 million a year from the strapped cleanup budget for Hanford, which the DOE itself calls the most toxic site in North America.
Fellow DKos poster rodentrancher added a comment to this diary back in October .. a few excerpts from the complete comment add to my anxiety regarding this issue (bolds by me) ..
There's no real risk to those offsite NOW. However, it's reasonable for those who were downwind during the plutonium production era (1944 - 1989) to have concerns. It's also reasonable to worry about the potential for contamination of the Columbia river in the future.
Hanford currently has no active nuclear production facilities likely to cause a nuclear or chemical release. The airborne contamination released from Hanford came from the processing of spent fuel, which could release short-lived but volatile radioisotopes into the air. How much was released depends on what time frame you're talking about, and whose data you believe. But fuel reprocessing stopped entirely in 1989, and it could not be started again even if they wanted to.
The problem with the contaminated groundwater on site and Columbia river isn't a "now" thing, it's a "gonna happen if we don't do something" thing. The site has underground storage tanks (some leaking) containing huge amounts of radioactive waste, and plumes of groundwater heavily contaminated with both chemicals and radioactivity. But this stuff hasn't yet reached the river in significant amounts.
The problem, of course, is that the gunk on site will eventually get to the river, if nothing is done, and then the people downstream will have real problems. So downstream water users are right to keep an eye on the place, right to want the cleanup to be handled more effectively, and right to be pissed of that the Bush administration has slashed cleanup funds. But you don't have to worry about swimming in the Columbia, or drinking water taken from it - yet.
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Here are my children, soon-to-be ex President Bush and President Elect Obama. They swim in the waters of the Columbia. They will inherit this mess. They deserve more than slashed clean up funds and silence.