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The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation
in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm, a rolling expanse
of high desert sloping toward the last untamed reaches of the
Columbia River. The T stands for tanks, huge single-hulled containers
buried some fifty feet beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand
holding the lethal detritus of Hanford's fifty-year run as the
nation's H-bomb factory.
Those tanks had an expected
lifespan of 35 years; the radioactive gumbo inside them has a
half-life of 250,000 years. Dozens of those tanks have now started
to corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic material on earth,
plutonium and uranium-contaminated sludge and liquid, on an inexorable
path toward the Columbia, the world's most productive salmon
fishery and the source of irrigation water for the farms and
orchards of the Inland Empire, centered on Spokane in eastern
Washington.
Internal documents from the
Department of Energy and various private contractors working
at Hanford reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive
sludge has already leaked out of at least 67 different tanks.
Those tanks and others continue to leak and that the leaks are
getting much larger.
One internal report shows the
results from a borehole drilled into the ground between two of
Hanford's largest tanks. Using gamma spectrometry, geologists
detected a fifty-fold increase in contamination between 1996
and 2002. The leak from those tanks, and perhaps an underground
pipeline, was described as "insignificant" a decade
ago. Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled up
into a "continuous plume" of highly radioactive Cesium-137.
Obviously, there's been a major
radioactive breach from those tanks. But to date the Department
of Energy has refused to publicly report the incident, even though
it was reported by their own geologists.
A few hundred yards away, a
tank called TY-102, the third largest tank at Hanford, is also
leaking. Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled
container and a broken subsurface pipe into what geologists call
the "vadose zone", the stratum of subsurface soil just
above the water table. In an internal 1998 report, the Grand
Junction Office of the DOE detected significant contamination
42 to 52 feet below the surface and concluded in a memo to Hanford
managers that the "high levels of gamma radiation"
came from "a subsurface source" of Cesium-137, which
likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102".
This alarming report was swiftly
buried by Hanford officials. So too was the evidence of leakage
at tanks TY-103 and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared
that portion of the tank farm to be "controlled, clean and
stable".
No surprises here. The long-standing
strategy of the DOE has been to conceal any evidence of radioactive
leaking at Hanford, a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal
review by the department's Inspector General, which concluded
that "Hanford's existing waste management policies and practices
have themselves sufficed to keep publicity about possible tank
leaks to a minimum."
Needless to say, the Reagan
years didn't augure a new forthrightness from the people who
run Hanford. Seven years and several congressional hearings after
the Inspector General's report was released, bureaucratic cover-up
and public denial were still the DOE's operational reflex to
any disturbing data bubbling up out of Hanford's boreholes. By
1987, Hanford officials had learned an important lesson in the
art of concealment. The easiest way to avoid bad press and public
hostility was to simply stop monitoring sites that seemed the
most likely to produce unpleasant information.
It is now clear that the tanks
began leaking as early as 1956, only a few years after the Atomic
Energy Commission began pumping the poisonous sludge into the
giant subterranean containers. It is also clear that the federal
government covered up evidence of those leaks since the moment
it learned of them.
How many tanks are leaking?
How far has the contamination spread? The DOE isn't talking.
It isn't even looking for answers. But geologists estimated that
the faster migrating contaminants, such as uranium, will move
from the groundwater beneath Hanford's central plateau to the
Columbia in something around 25 years. That means that the first
traces of radiated water could have started seeping into the
Columbia in 2001.
This reckless strategy persists.
In a document called "Official Characterization Plan of
Hanford" -essentially a kind of 3-D map of contamination
at the site the DOEchose not to include Cobalt-60, a highly
radioactive material that is present at deep levels across the
tank farm. In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention the
fact that its own surveys have shown large amounts of Cesium-137
and Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools in the geological stratum
called the plio-pleistocene unit, the last barrier between Hanford's
soils and water table.
If the DOE remains locked onto
this courseit will never acknowledge or even investigate the
potentially lethal flow of radioactivity toward the great river
of the West. That's because the managers of Hanford say they
will only research potential leaks if they detect a level of
contamination several times higher than that ever recorded at
Hanford a standard clearly designed to shield them from
ever having to pursue any subsurface leak investigation or publicly
admit the existence of such leaks.
To help Hanford's managers
avoid ever discovering such embarrassing leaks, the site plan
calls for them to drill the penetrometer holes, through which
contamination is measured, only to a depth of 40 feet or
two feet above the bottom of the tanks, guaranteeing that they
will avoid picking up any radioactive traces from the region
of the most dangerous contamination.
There's a reason the Hanford
managers want the public to believe that most of the contamination
at the site is limited to the surface terrain. Theoretically,
the topsoil can be scooped up and, with large government contracts,
transferred to a more secure site or zapped into a glass-like
substance through the big vitrification center now under construction.
There's no way to de-contaminate groundwater or the Columbia
River. Their only hope for containment is to contain the issue
politically by plumbing the leaks from whistleblowers.
There's no question that the
subsurface leakage is serious, extensive and dangerous. The internal
survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction Office detected high
levels of C-137 deeper than 100 feet below the surface
and 60 feet deeper than the current plan calls for probing. That
report concluded that both C-137 and CO-60 had "reached
groundwater in this area of the tank farm".
Consider this: C-137 is a slow
traveling contaminant. How far have faster moving radioactive
materials, such as uranium, spread? No one knows. No one is even
looking.
The DOE and Hanford's contractors
want to close down the C Quadrant of the tank farm and declare
it cleaned up, even though more than 10 per cent of the waste
at that site remains in tanks with documented leaks. There is
mounting evidence that a plume of Tritium-contaminated sludge
has recently penetrated the groundwater there as well.
John Brodeur is one of the
nation's top environmental engineers and a world-class geologist.
In 1997, after a whistleblower at Hanford disclosed evidence
that the groundwater beneath the central plateau had been contaminated
by plumes of radioactivity, Hazel O'Leary commissioned Brodeur
to investigate how far the contamination had spread. It proved
to be a nearly impossible assignment since the DOE and its contractors
had taken extreme measures to conceal the data or avoid collecting
it entirely.
Now, nearly ten years later,
Brodeur has once again been asked to assess the situation at
one of the most contaminated sites on earth, this time for the
environmental group Heart of the Northwest. His conclusions are
disturbing.
"There remains much that
we don't know about the subsurface contamination plumes at Hanford,"
says John Brodeur. "The only way to solve this dilemma is
to identify what we don't know up front and get it out on the
table for discussion. This is difficult to do in the chilling
work environment where bad data are commonplace, lies of omission
are standard practice and people loose their jobs because they
disagreed with some of the long-held institutional myths at Hanford."
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