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Executive Summary
The
Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeastern Washington is one of the
most contaminated nuclear waste sites in the world. During four decades
of building nuclear weapons, more than 450 billion gallons of
radioactive waste was dumped into the soil and into the Columbia River,
enough to submerge the city of Seattle in a lake of waste 25 feet deep.
Storage tanks for the most toxic liquid waste have leaked a million
gallons of highly radioactive contaminants into the groundwater table.
Containing the threat to public health and the environment from the
Hanford Site will be a daunting and time consuming task, but a vitally
necessary one.
Unfortunately,
the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is advancing a new cleanup plan
that will undermine progress and leave Washington at risk. The agency
plans to abandon large amounts of high-level waste in leaking
underground tanks, weaken groundwater cleanup standards, and ship in
additional waste from nuclear weapons facilities all over the country.
To
protect Washington from nuclear waste and ensure that DOE lives up to
its commitment to clean up the Hanford Site, citizens have banded
together to put forward Initiative 297 for voter approval this
November. The initiative would require DOE to properly address the
existing contamination at Hanford. This report summarizes the major
issues behind Initiative 297 and the role it will play in holding the
DOE to a higher standard.
Hanford is America’s Nuclear Waste Dumping Ground
Of all the waste generated in producing nuclear material for America’s nuclear arsenal, the Hanford Site holds:
• nearly 90 percent of the spent reactor fuel, the most radioactive substance on earth;
• almost 60 percent of the most dangerous high-level radioactive and toxic wastes; and
•
60 percent of the equipment and materials contaminated with highly
radioactive transuranic wastes generated during bomb production, most
of which is buried in shallow, unlined trenches.
These
wastes remain dangerous for thousands to millions of years, and will
need to be isolated from the human environment to ensure safety.
Hanford’s Land and Water Are Massively Contaminated
Contaminated groundwater beneath the Hanford Site covers an area larger
than the city of Seattle, between 80 and 200 square miles in size. The
contamination is spreading toward the Columbia River and poses a
serious threat to the future health of the region. The groundwater
contamination includes:
• plumes of radioactive iodine, strontium, technetium, tritium, carbon, cesium, plutonium, and uranium.
• toxic chemicals like carbon tetrachloride, chromium, nitrate, arsenic, fluoride, and trichloroethylene.
Plumes
of radioactive strontium and tritium and toxic chromium have already
reached the Columbia River, and are entering the water at levels
thousands of times higher than EPA drinking water standards. The
tritium plume releases 3,000 curies of radiation into the Columbia
River every year (60 times as much radioactivity as was released by the
Three Mile Island accident).
The major sources of contamination include:
•
Over 400 billion gallons of toxic and radioactive liquids and millions
of cubic feet of radioactive solids dumped and buried into unlined
trenches and pits over the past 50 years. Some of this contamination
has already reached the Columbia River.
•
53 million gallons of extremely radioactive high-level waste, mixed
with hazardous chemicals and stored in aging tanks that have leaked at
least one million gallons into the groundwater. The DOE estimates that
this waste, among the greatest threats at the site, could reach the
river in as little as ten years, and continue contaminating it for
another 4,000 years.
The
Columbia River provides drinking water for more than 1.5 million
people, irrigation water for important agricultural areas in Oregon and
Washington, and is one of the most important spawning areas for Chinook
salmon in the entire Pacific Northwest. River contamination holds the
potential to endanger large numbers of people.
The
Department of Energy’s Cleanup Plan: Lower Standards for Groundwater
Cleanup, Abandon High-Level Waste in Leaking Tanks, and Ship in More
Waste from Other Facilities
In May 2002, the Department of
Energy announced an “accelerated cleanup plan” for Hanford. However,
the cleanup plan cuts corners, leaving important tasks undone and
Washington at risk. Important milestones originally laid out in the
Tri-Party Agreement, the legally binding cleanup plan agreed upon by
DOE, the U.S. EPA, and the Washington Department of Ecology in 1989,
would be abandoned under the new plan.
1) Weakening Groundwater Cleanup Standards
•
In a recent decision, the DOE labeled the contamination of Hanford’s
groundwater “irreversible and irretrievable.” This label opens several
legal doors for the DOE to scale back or abandon plans to clean up the
contaminated groundwater.
•
The DOE is also planning to clean up waste sites to a weaker standard
and checking for compliance farther away, where the pollution is more
likely to be diluted. These steps will make cleanup easier, but allow
further pollution of the water.
2) Abandoning High-Level Waste Sludge in Leaking Underground Tanks
•
The DOE is working with Congress to change the definition of high-level
waste, legally allowing the abandonment of highly radioactive sludge in
leaking underground tanks. Under this loophole, the DOE would be able
extract some waste, then fill the tank with grout and abandon it. Under
the original cleanup agreement, DOE is required to remove more than 99
percent of the waste, immobilize it in glass, and store it in a
national repository.
3) Shipping in Waste From Other Facilities
•
On June 23, 2004, the DOE issued a final decision to import three
million cubic feet of radioactive waste over the next 40 years from
weapons facilities across the country and dump them at Hanford.
•
The plan includes a landfill large enough to accept all the waste
generated at Hanford, plus 13 million to 34 million cubic feet of
imported waste. The size of the proposed landfill brings DOE’s stated
intention to limit waste imports to 3 million cubic feet into question.
•
Adding additional waste will distract from the cleanup effort and
exacerbate dangers associated with transporting nuclear waste,
including terrorism and accidents.
A Better Plan for Hanford: Initiative 297
The Protect Washington Initiative, I-297, would hold the DOE to a higher standard.
It would:
•
Focus cleanup efforts on dealing with the contamination already present
at Hanford instead of importing new waste from off site.
•
Ensure that the high-level radioactive waste in leaking tanks is
cleaned up to the standards set in state and federal hazardous waste
laws, instead of abandoned in the ground.
•
Require cleanup of waste previously dumped into unlined trenches, and
monitoring of groundwater to detect any contamination that may have
resulted.
• Enable greater public participation in decisions at Hanford.
The
initiative is necessary because DOE has a history of making cleanup
promises to the people of Washington and failing to follow through, as
well as a history of mismanagement of the cleanup effort. Initiative
297 provides stronger legal tools to protect Washington.
Vote Yes on I-297!
Washington voters have the power to reject the DOE’s reckless plan to
abandon contamination at Hanford while importing new waste from other
states. In order to ensure that the DOE cleans up Hanford and follows
the same hazardous waste laws that every private company in the state
must comply with, citizens should vote yes on I-297.
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