The U.S. government’s 75-year history of feckless management of military nuclear wastes at the Hanford, Wash., site has drawn new criticism from the Government Accountability Office. The congressional watchdog agency, in a report released Feb. 20, said the Department of Energy had failed to adequately analyze the May 2017 collapse of a plutonium uranium extraction (PUREX) tunnel.
The Washington Post reported that DOE, the successor to the Manhattan Project that created the Hanford weapons site to make nuclear weapons from the mid-1940s, bowed to a contractor who objected to a detailed analysis of the tunnel collapse. According to the GAO report, DOE waived a “root cause analysis” of the collapse, at the request of contractor Jacobs Engineering.
Nuclear Engineering International reported that DOE’s Richland (Wash.) Operations Office, which agreed to waive the root cause analysis, also told the congressional investigators that they didn’t start an accident investigation because the tunnel collapse “did not meet threshold requirements in a DOE that includes, for example, damages or costs xceeding $2.5 million.”
That excuse, said GAO, was bogus: it’s calculations of the cost of responding and stabilizing the tunnel amounted to $10 million.
The Washington Post accounted noted that GEO found that “Parts of the [Hanford] site have not been entered or inspected in more than 50 years, “suggesting there could be additional safety risks of which the Energy Department is not aware.” Inspections that have been conducted, said GAO, found that severe problems in the waste management program “could lead to the potential release of hazardous or nuclear materials” at five of the 18 waste sites at Hanford, which is situated along the Columbia River, the border between Washington and Oregon.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), one of the legislators who requested the GAO investigation, in a letter after the report, asked Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette to detail what steps the agency will take “to ensure that there will not be any unexpected failures of containment at legacy radioactive waste facilities at Hanford.”
The wastes at the Hanford site are particularly wicked, a nasty liquid brew of, as I put it in my 2012 history of the U.S. atomic weapons endeavor, Too Dumb to Meter, “chemicals and radioactive isotopes resulting from the plutonium reprocessing operation at the Hanford Engineering Works on the Columbia River in Washington.” The Army and, later the Atomic Energy Commission’s approach to waste management at the time, was “out of sight-out of mind.” They pumped the liquids into giant holding tanks and largely forgot about them.
It took a Baltimore “sanitary engineer,” Abel Wolman, who was responsible in 1919 for developing chlorine treatment of drinking water to make it safe for human consumption, to alert the AEC to its waste management negligence. Johns Hopkins University engineering professor Wolman, chairman of the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Sanitary Engineering, was a member of the AEC’s advisory board on waste management. He visited the AEC’s weapons labs and production facilities. In 1947, along with another sanitary engineer, Arthur Gorman, they produced a report deeply critical of the agency’s exposure limits to chemicals and radiation, noting that the AEC launched its waste management and exposure program without consulting with “public health officers normally concerned with and responsible for such problems in civilian life.”
The Wolman-Gorman report had little impact on the weapons makers. A 1997 DOE history of the weapons facilities’ waste management found the program was uncoordinated among the various AEC operations, with each setting its own radiation exposure guidelines. The individual waste management plans focused too much on radiation hazards to workers and too little on release of toxic wastes to the environment.
But the neglect continued, and eventually the steel tanks holding liquid wastes at Hanford began leaking toxins into the environment, with fears they were headed to the river.
The latest GAO report suggests that not much has changed in the federal government’s handling of military chemical and nuclear wastes. DOE says it will conduct the GAO-recommended roots cause analysis by the end of 2020.
In the meantime, on the civilian side of waste management, President Trump in Nevada for the states presidential primary nominating caucuses affirmed the decision in his fiscal 2021 budget submission to Congress to pull prior-year funding requests for reviving the moribund Yucca Mountain, Nevada, site for storing used nuclear fuel. The Hill reported that Trump said, “I also recently took action on an issue Nevada has been dealing with for over 30 years, Yucca Mountain. You know Yucca Mountain? My budget stops funding for the licensing of waste storage at Yucca Mountain so we can focused on positive solutions.
“Why should you have nuclear waste in your backyard?”
— Kennedy Maize