State health officials in Washington have expressed a long list of concerns in a five-page letter to the U.S. Department of Energy regarding high readings of radioactivity at the decommissioned Hanford Site, a massively contaminated area half the size of Rhode Island that has been on the U.S. Superfund list for 30 years and is now the location of the world’s largest environmental clean-up. That work has been suspended since December because of air sample readings of americium and plutonium five to ten times allowable levels under federal standards for year-long exposure.
The top concern is that while the Health Department figured that the contamination situation was going to improve in 2017, the trend has been opposite.
The letter to the DOE was written by the Health Department’s Assistant Secretary Clark Halvorson. Hal Berton reports:
Since [December], more than 270 workers concerned about their health have requested bioassays to test for radioactive exposure. Results released so far have covered 109 workers and found that two tested positive for having inhaled or ingested radioactive particles.
Halvorson’s five-page letter to the Energy Department said there is no indication of a health threat off the site, but “if work resumes without better controls a risk to the public may develop.”
The letter reflects the more hands-on approach the state health department is taking amid concern over the federal response. Test results indicate the contamination spread over months of cleanup work at the plutonium finishing plant.
Bioassays conducted last summer found 31 workers contaminated after air-sampling found americium exceeded three times the federal standard for yearlong exposure.
Seventy-five years ago, the federal government established the beginnings of a nuclear complex at Hanford, in the southern part of Washington at the confluence of three rivers, as part of the Manhattan Project to build the world’s first atomic weapons. Hundreds of American Indians were moved off their lands to make way for the complex at what was then a remote site.
A reactor was built to produce plutonium used to fuel the first nuclear device at the Trinity site in New Mexico and the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. Eight other reactors were added over the years, plus five plutonium processing operations, and numerous other facilities totaling more than 60 buildings. Although the last government reactor was shuttered in 1987, ending plutonium production, operations on the site today include a commercial electricity-generating reactor and two research facilities.
In the process of manufacturing plutonium for two of the first three nuclear weapons and tens of thousands more during the Cold War, the air, ground, and water in and around the Hanford Site became profoundly contaminated with large amounts of radioactive byproducts and nuclear waste as a result of reckless ignorance and inadequate controls. A number of large releases poured radioactive water into the rivers. Demolition and clean-up of the site began in 1989 under supervision of the Department of Energy, which took over the site in 1977.
The high-level nuclear waste—now 60 percent of the U.S. total—was stored in underground tanks, most of them of a single-shell design. Many leaked into the surrounding environment over the years, including into groundwater. Aquifers in the area now contain 270 million gallons of slowly spreading contaminated water. Much of the retained waste has been transferred into double-shell tanks. But several of these also leaked, some of them recently.
Without citizen protest and other actions, Hanford might forever have remained a closed book. But their grassroots efforts begun in the late 1960s pressured the government eventually to release huge amounts of previously unavailable information about the site, much of which was highly disturbing. The Hanford Health Information Network, a grassroots organization, postulated in 2007 that downwind residents of the site could be at risk of extra cancers and other diseases.
With nearby communities now populated by nearly 250,000 people, the unknown long-term effects of contamination, particularly of the groundwater, are particularly worrisome, despite official assurances.
As the Trump regime prepares to needlessly expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal while simultaneously reducing environmental regulations, what has happened at Hanford provides a cautionary tale. But when it comes to pollution of any kind, caution is far from a watchword of our current crop of top leaders.