Expended energy, little result
Cleanup of Hanford, Wash., site over decades has proven as radioactive as its waste
From 1950 to 1990, the U.S. Energy Department produced an average of four nuclear bombs every day, turning them out of hastily built factories with few environmental safeguards that left behind a vast legacy of toxic radioactive waste.
Nowhere were the problems greater than at the Hanford Site in Washington state, where engineers sent to clean up the mess after the Cold War discovered 54 million gallons of highly radioactive sludge left from producing the plutonium in America’s atomic bombs, including the one dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki in 1945.
Cleaning out the underground tanks that were leaching poisonous waste toward the Columbia River just 6 miles away and somehow stabilizing it for permanent disposal presented one of the most complex chemical problems ever encountered. Engineers thought they had solved it years ago with an elaborate plan to pump out the sludge, embed it in glass and deposit it deep in the mountains of the Nevada desert.
But construction of a five-story, 137,000-square-foot chemical treatment plant for the task was halted in 2012 — after an expenditure of $4 billion — when it was found to be riddled with safety defects. The naked superstructure of the plant has stood in mothballs for 11 years, a potent symbol of the nation’s failure, nearly 80 years after World War II, to deal decisively with the atomic era’s deadliest legacy.
The cleanup at Hanford is now at an inflection point. The Energy Department has been in closed-door negotiations with state officials and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, trying to revamp the plan. But many fear the most likely compromises, which could be announced in the coming months, will put the speed and quality of the cleanup at risk. The government now appears to be seriously evaluating the need to leave thousands of gallons of leftover waste buried forever in Hanford’s shallow underground tanks, according to some of those familiar with the negotiations, and protect some of the waste not in impenetrable glass but in a concrete grout casing that would almost certainly decay thousands of years before the toxic materials that it is designed to hold at bay.
“The Energy Department is coming to a big crossroads,” said Thomas Grumbly, a former assistant secretary at the department who oversaw the early days of the project during the Clinton administration.
Successive energy secretaries over the last 30 years, he said, “have slammed their heads against the wall” to come up with a technology and budget that would make the problem go away not only at Hanford but also at other nuclear weapons sites around the country.
Hanford, some 580 square miles of shrub-steppe desert in south-central Washington state, is the largest and most contaminated of all the weapons production sites — too polluted to ever be returned to public use.
The search for a solution has dragged on so long that there is pressure to produce some result for all the massive spending, even if it does not meet past expectations. That could mark a dramatic retreat from long-standing promises to nearby residents — who experienced thyroid, reproductive and nervous system tumors linked by researchers to exposure during the era of plutonium production — the government would adhere to the highest possible cleanup standards.
The negotiations between federal and state officials have involved stretching out the cleanup schedule and using grout instead of glass to stabilize about half of the low-level radioactive waste taken from the site, as well as thousands of gallons of waste stuck in the tanks when the rest of the high-level waste is removed.
The potential for a compromise that would allow some of that waste to remain in the bottom of the tanks has set off sharp disagreements among experts. Some say using grout to encase it would be a scientifically safe, economical solution. Critics warn that the waste could outlive the grout and seep out again in future centuries.
Energy Department officials say any plan adopted will be sufficient to render the site safe for future generations and that any waste left behind would pose no threat to human health.
Brian Vance, a former Navy submarine captain who is the department’s site manager at Hanford, said the original expectations ran into formidable scientific and financial obstacles. He said engineers were trying to find a solution that was both safe and possible.
“If you think about the decisions made in the 1990s, the project plan was quite a bit different,” he said. It required unproven technology that was “easy to make on the drawing board, but hard to make as you progress and see the realities.”
Grumbly said he presented the Clinton administration years ago with budget estimates of hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up former nuclear weapons sites around the country. Officials at the Office of Management and Budget told him “to never show them publicly,” he recalled.
“They have underprioritized it,” he said of the federal government, noting even now, the Biden administration had not nominated an assistant secretary to oversee the cleanup.