The fear that local activists are harboring is that of an overturned tanker truck, sprawled like a corpse across the pavement of Interstate 5. It’s the small hours of the morning in Eugene. It’s dark. The dull yellow of its dimming headlights plead weakly through the blue night and fog. From the fissures in its metal skin, the truck is hemorrhaging radioactive waste.
Their fear is not now reality. But, they said, if the weapons-grade plutonium-producing Hanford Site nuclear plant that has lain dormant for past 20 years in southeastern Washington state is reopened, their fear could come true.
But a woman involved with cleanup efforts at Hanford said that’s extremely unlikely, and that the activists are simplifying the potential expansion into a black and white issue when it is, in fact, a variety of shades of gray. The U.S. Department of Energy is currently exploring a plan to expand Hanford into a treatment and storage site for high-level nuclear waste, but it’s still unclear whether the plan will come to fruition.
In any event, the fear of the Emerald City transforming into a Chernobyl-style nuclear wasteland is getting local activists fired-up.
Kathy Ging and Matt Laubach of the Lane County Energy Round-up group, which has sponsored two well-attended community discussions on alternative energy this year, are telling a story with good guys, bad guys, and a potentially dire conclusion.
The Hanford Site, which was used for decades to produce weapons-grade plutonium and was closed 20 years ago, is the worst contaminated nuclear site in the United States.
According to the Hanford Site’s Web site, “Physical challenges at the Hanford Site include more than 50 million gallons of high-level liquid waste in 177 underground storage tanks, 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel, 12 tons of plutonium in various forms, about 25 million cubic feet of buried or stored solid waste, and about 270 billion gallons of groundwater contaminated above drinking water standards, spread out over about 80 square miles, more than 1,700 waste sites, and about 500 contaminated facilities.”
The U.S. Department of Energy is currently considering a plan to re-open the plant for storage and cleaning of high-level nuclear waste. After its treatment there, Laubach said it would be shipped to the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository in Nevada, which is slated to begin receiving waste on March 31, 2017.
The storage of the waste is dangerous in and of itself, Laubach said, but the danger for Eugeneans is primarily in the shipment.
“The question is whether they have to ability to deal with spills,” Ging said.
Laubach said “high-level radioactive waste” will be shipped along Oregon’s railroads highways – including Interstate 5 that bisects Eugene and Springfield – from plants around the country.
“It’s a target for terrorists,” he said.
The good guys in this, he said, are the activists – himself included – who traveled on the local Vets for Peace chapter’s biodiesel bus to a public meeting on the site last week in Hood River to oppose the development there. The bad guys, he said, were the mayor of Richland, Wash., and city council members from the surrounding communities who support the expansion and the DOE, which is funding the project.
Today – Wednesday April 4 – is the last day that citizens can petition the DOE to stop the expansion by sending messages to [email protected], Ging said.But Pam Brown Larsen, who is the executive director of the Hanford Communities organization that gathers information on the site’s cleanup for the surrounding governments, said the story is not that simple.
The DOE still has to jump a great many hurdles before any waste is shipped anywhere, and some of the hurdles are quite tall.
As a result of a lawsuit filed by the Yakima Nation native peoples, the DOE agreed Tuesday to begin a multi-million dollar assessment of environmental damages that have resulted from the site. The assessment, the Associated Press reported, is largely viewed as a precursor to a monetary settlement – a victory for the Yakima Nation and a loss for the DOE. This announcement came after it was revealed Monday that the Environmental Protection Agency is leveling a record $1.1 million fine against the DOE for incompetence and failing to clean up the site adequately.
Both the DOE and the Hanford Site did not return phone calls Tuesday.
Larsen said that the DOE has not made any decision whether to expand the shipment of nuclear waste to or from the Hanford site. The site is attractive for the housing of waste because of its dry climate, she said, but in any event at least two years will pass before any movement could begin.
There is currently a “legal block” against the DOE in the form of a scientifically rigorous Environmental Impact Statement, which has yet to be completed. The EIS will include such information as what waste already exists at the site, the capacity of the current structures for holding new waste and whether the site could hold new waste of any kind at all.
But even though there are some serious barriers to the expansion of activity there, Larsen said that most of the activists’ fears are irrational.
She said that waste material “has been going through (the Hanford) community for years,” and that there’s never been an incident.
“They don’t ship liquid waste,” she said. “I don’t think they have anything to fear.”
At Hanford, a complex chemical process changes liquid waste into glass, which are then put into special containers that make shipment safe.
Also, she said that even if more waste started coming into Hanford, little of it would come along Interstate 5.
Terrorism is unlikely as well, she said, because the plutonium at the plant is waste plutonium that would be totally ineffective as a weapon.
“It’s not weapons-grade material,” she said, “it’s the junk stuff that’s left over from making weapons-grade material.”
Even the plutonium that could pose a potential risk in the wrong hands is guarded in a high security location. She also said that terrorists would be hesitant to attack a truck because it’s just too difficult.
She also said that there is serious local opposition to expanding operations at the site, especially turning it into a storage site for the nation’s nuclear waste.
“The city of Richland draws its drinking water from the Columbia River three miles south,” she said. The DOE is “gonna have to prove that there’s no way” that contamination could spread outward, endangering the local citizens and environment.
And the plant isn’t even a central part of the local economy anymore, she said, so new jobs aren’t a big local concern. What is a concern for Larsen isn’t future plans for the site, but rather what’s happening there right now.
The DOE “has an obligation” to clean up Hanford, she said, and they’re falling behind.
“We want the Hanford Site cleaned up,” she said. “And we want it done.”
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