Nuclear cleanup is Perry’s next test
Ex-governor must reconcile promises by old regimes, new calls for budget cuts
WASHINGTON — Almost three decades after the Department of Energy began its cleanup of the Hanford nuclear complex, the more than 500-square-mile site in central Washington state remains highly radioactive and off limits to the public, a relic of Cold War-era plutonium production for nuclear warheads.
Now, Energy Secretary Rick Perry is looking to make his mark on a cleanup process that is still decades from completion, greenlighting Energy Department officials to move ahead on a proposal that would allow them to speed up and reduce the costs of cleanup by reclassifying the 53 million gallons of highly toxic radioactive waste left behind in a network of underground tanks at Hanford.
The proposal has set off alarms in the Pacific Northwest, where state officials, tribal leaders and environmentalists worry the Trump administration is embarking on a cost-cutting effort that would allow the federal government to leave more radioactive waste in the ground than had been promised by past administrations.
“They have not given us specifics on what they want to do, but we are trying to read into what might be possible if they go down that road,” said Ken Niles, assistant director for nuclear safety at the Oregon Department of Energy. “We are worried that new classification allows them to
leave the waste in tanks, which would be a huge change from the plan we’ve operated under for the last 30 years.”
An Energy Department official said the agency had not made a decision and would be reviewing public comments, which are due by Jan. 9.
Beyond oil
The Hanford cleanup marks the latest test of Perry’s ability to manage a broad and highly technical portfolio that goes fay beyond oil wells and the power grid. And like modernizing the nuclear weapons arsenal, another responsibility of the energy secretary, it involves a long scientific record and a diverse list of stakeholders that have tested administrations for decades.
Hanford sits on the banks of the Columbia River, which runs through the mountains of Washington and Oregon before emptying into the Pacific Ocean. It was developed during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project, manufacturing the plutonium in the first atomic bombs. By the 1950s and ’60s, the site was so toxic that radioactive waste leached through the ground and into the river, killing fish and potentially sickening local residents.
The reactors were shut down and the contamination contained, with the federal government pledging to remove or stabilize the radioactive waste on site.
Under the proposal laid out by Perry’s Energy Department, officials at the agency would study the toxic sludge stored at Hanford and two federal sites in South Carolina and Idaho to see if it still needs be labeled “high-level radioactive waste.” That designation, applied by past administrations, requires the waste to be removed from the tanks and processed into a glasslike substance, stored at a disposal facility on-site or, for most toxic waste, at a federal, underground repository such as the one proposed at the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada.
Were officials to deem the waste a lower level of radioactive risk, they could leave the waste where it is or transport it to secure repositories closer to the earth’s surface. But what constitutes “high-level” waste is not clearly defined in the law, leaving Perry, the former Texas governor, some latitude in determining a course of action.
“You write a document saying the risk is below what we set and declare it to be acceptable risk,” said Dan Sears, conservation director at Columbia Riverkeeper, an environmental group among the organizations protesting the Energy Department’s proposal. “If the waste is left on-site, it will slowly leach into the soil and then on to groundwater and then into the Columbia River. The river is a lifeblood of this region.”
Delays and more delays
No end appears in site for the Hanford cleanup. The process of turning the nuclear waste into glass-like logs, known as vitrification, was supposed to begin eight years ago. But a raft of technical difficulties has pushed back the estimated start date to 2022, prompting the Government Accountability Organization, a federal watchdog agency , to chastise the Energy Department earlier this year for failing to catch persistent “engineering errors and construction deficiencies.”
The never-ending delays have prompted frustration in the communities around Hanford. Last year the Energy Communities Alliance, an advocacy group representing communities around Department of Energy facilities, issued a report calling for many of the same policy changes the Energy Department has now proposed.
The hope among local officials is that sites like Hanford one day might be used for industrial development and recreation, not only for tourists but the Native American tribes that have long fished the Columbia’s waters.
“If (Perry’s proposal) turns out to be safe and risk-based, that would potentially allow waste to move much faster,” said Kara Colton, director of nuclear energy programs at the Alliance.
But state governments in Washington and Oregon are preparing comments warning Perry that if he turns away from the path set over the past three decades to an unproven plan that might not work, he could set the cleanup back years. Alex Smith, a program manager at the Washington Department of Ecology, said she understood the temptation to try a new approach after so many years of frustration but doing so posed too great a risk.
“There’s some concern (among local officials) Congress will lose its will to keep funding the cleanup and there’s people who would rather have something rather than nothing,” she said. “We all have agreed on a path forward, and we want to stay the course.”
For state officials, the concern is not the state of the river now, but decades from now, when radioactive waste on site might leach through the ground and into the river.
When will they learn?
With cleanup projected to run more than $100 billion in the decades ahead, finding a way to cut those costs inevitably entices energy secretaries like Perry. But so far, no one has found a way to pull it off within strict federal standards around radioactive waste.
“Going back to Reagan and the first Bush and Clinton, there have been a couple constants. Usually early on they say, ‘this is really expensive. What can we do not to spend this money?’ Then there’s been a period where they say ‘we can figure out how make it a whole lot cheaper and faster,’ ” Miles, the Oregon environmental official, said. “Often those end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars in delays. The track record has not been good on finding cheaper and faster.”