A deadly pandemic, spiking murders, houselessness, climate change. Distressing news arrives every day from across the U.S.
The Pacific Northwest, unfortunately, has still more -- specifically, the situation at the federal government’s decommissioned nuclear-production workhorse known as the Hanford Site, a problem so entrenched we tend to forget about it.
The literary journal Virginia Quarterly Review (VQR) is now reminding us of this looming threat. Its deeply reported new piece “Cold War, Hot Mess,” available online for free, is well worth the time of anyone who lives in the region. Here are some of the highlights:
• The article opens with longtime Hanford Nuclear Reservation employee Abe Garza and other workers making their way to one of the site’s holding tanks in 2015 to conduct a routine inspection.
“Shortly after he arrived at the work site, [Garza’s] nose started bleeding, and wouldn’t stop,” reporter Lois Parshley writes. “Another crew member complained of a terrible headache. A third said he could smell something like onions. (Previous chemical exposures at work had destroyed Garza’s ability to smell.) Garza knew right away something had gone wrong, but it was already too late: A potentially lethal cloud of chemicals was sweeping over them.”
Garza was later diagnosed with heavy-metal poisoning -- as well as toxic encephalopathy, a dementia-like condition that often proves fatal.
A Hanford worker on the job in 1994.
Nearly 60% of Hanford workers have reported exposure to hazardous materials, the article states. And workers aren’t the only ones at risk. Over the eight decades of Hanford’s existence, radioactive waste has seeped into the groundwater and radioactive effluvium has been released into the air that has blown for miles. Portland is about 230 miles from Hanford.
A 2002 study found that Native American children from the Hanford area have “an extremely elevated risk of immune diseases.” Cancer is also exceptionally prevalent among residents of the area.
• There are hundreds of tanks at Hanford like the one Garza was inspecting that day in 2015. “The amount of high-level waste currently in just one of Hanford’s hundreds of tanks would cover a football field to a depth of one foot,” the VQR article points out. “More than a third of the single-shell tanks have already leaked. One of the double-shell tanks, into which waste was moved after concerns over leaks, has also failed. In late April of 2021, news broke about a new leak in one of the single-shell tanks, which is estimated to be spilling nearly 1,300 gallons a year.” The tanks’ expected life span, in many cases, reached their limit 50 years ago.
The risk of an explosion that would cause a Chernobyl-like disaster is very real, says Tom Carpenter, who heads up the watchdog group Hanford Challenge.
• What is the U.S. government doing about it? Perennially underfunding cleanup of the sprawling Cold War-era site.
The journal writes: “In the face of these rising costs, the [Department of Energy] announced in 2019 that it would redefine what constitutes ‘high-level radioactive waste’ under federal law, which would allow it to leave additional waste in place, rather than transferring it to safer, long-term storage.”
The article adds:
“If Hanford’s tanks are left in place, it is likely that their radioactive pollutants and heavy metals will contaminate one of the country’s largest rivers, the Columbia. David Trimble, of the Government Accountability Office, describes this decision-making as ‘DOE has got the steering wheel from Mom and Dad and are now running for the highway.’”
• The cleanup is ongoing, but radioactive waste will continue to be stored at Hanford for decades, maybe forever. This could mean big trouble if the Big One -- that is, a large earthquake -- hits the Pacific Northwest.
“Geologists have also found that the power plant at Hanford -- which stores spent fuel rods in pools similar to the Fukushima reactor [in Japan] -- is at risk of experiencing seismic activity two to three times stronger than it was designed to handle,” the VQR piece states. “If power supplies failed, ‘it would take about a day for enough water to evaporate [from the pools] to cause a catastrophe.’”
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