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Federal officials said last week that six giant underground tanks holding a deadly mix of highly radioactive liquids and sludge are leaking at the 570-square-mile Hanford Reservation, on the Columbia River in South Central Washington State. Hanford is perhaps the dirtiest nuclear site in the world, with over 1,000 inactive nuclear dumps, 200 square miles of contaminated ground water, eight shut down reactors, and 50,000 drums of plutonium wastes in temporary storage.
    For 40 years, Hanford’s reactors mass produced plutonium for H-bombs, and in the process its managers dumped plutonium, cesium, technetium, tritium, strontium and other isotopes into the air, soil, ground water and, astonishingly, even into the Columbia River directly — the drinking water source for cities downstream including Portland.    
    Hanford has 53 million gallons of the high-level liquids and sludge in 177 aged and decrepit tanks. In the 1980s, the Dept. of Energy (DOE) disclosed that up to 69 of the million-gallon units were leaking, and February’s disclosure makes 75.
    In 1998, the DOE said it expected all the tanks to leak eventually. Twenty years ago Newsweek declared that all 177 were already leaking “radioactive glop.”
    Leaving aside the billions of gallons of nuclear poison previously poured directly into it, the New York Times reported in Oct. 1997 that, “If leaks from the tanks reach the Columbia River through ground water, radioactive material would eventually be incorporated into the food chain and could expose people to radiation for centuries.”
    DOE spokeswoman Lindsey Geisler said there was no immediate health risk from the newest leaks — a bogus reassurance since the agency said for decades that tank wastes would take 10,000 years to reach the ground water. It got there in under 40.
    Another PR twist came Feb. 22 when Washington Gov. Jay Inslee said that his state would impose a “zero-tolerance” policy on radioactive waste leaking into the soil. Looking back at Hanford’s record a “zero-containment” policy is more likely.

Tank leaks just
tip of leaching
radioactive iceberg

    This season’s leaks, which reportedly amount to 300 gallons per year, barely seem newsworthy in view of the colossal dumping that’s already been accomplished.
    The Seattle Times reported in March 1986, “The DOE estimates that as many as 750,000 curies* of radioactive iodine, xenon, cesium, strontium, plutonium and uranium may have been put into the Columbia River each year in the 1950s” — the heyday of plutonium production.
    A week earlier the paper reported, “Many of the releases involved dumping of [reactor] cooling water into the Columbia River.” Tim Connor of the citizens’ group Hanford Watch in Spokane told the paper then that daily releases of 430 curies noted in one 1946 report were, “the equivalent of a Three Mile Island accident every hour.”
    DOE officials admitted in 1991 that managers dumped 440 billion gallons of radioactive liquids directly into the soil — using ditches, cribs, trenches and injection wells — and that hazardous waste had “fouled the Columbia River.”
    Even with all the millions of curies thrown into the soil, a ground water manager at Hanford said in 2000 that the “worst” tank wastes, including technetium-99 and cobalt-60, are “probably still 20 years away” from the Columbia.
    Twenty-five years since its reactors were shut down, leaking plutonium tank wastes are only one of the ways that carcinogens are dispensed from Hanford.
    Wildfires burned 300 acres of the reservation in summer 2000, terrifying downwinders all over again. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson rushed to say on July 1, “There does not appear to be any contamination whatsoever.” By August 3, plutonium was found to have been lofted to 10 far-flung areas, including five Eastern Washington city neighborhoods.
    Even then, Jerry Leitch, an EPA official, told the Seattle Post that the amount of plutonium was below what’s considered a threat to health. Deceptively, Leitch was speaking only of external exposure, because a single particle of inhaled plutonium can cause lung cancer.
    The current program to solidify and store the tank wastes is billions over budget, years behind schedule and may not actually work. The likely cost of Hanford’s partial cleanup — the most expensive anti-pollution effort in history — has increased from DOE’s 1989 guess of $57 billion, to its latest estimate of $200 billion plus.

Studies show increased
cancer incidence

    In 1986, researcher Michael Blain at Boise State Univ. showed that women in Eastern Washington and Northern Idaho had elevated rates of thyroid and breast cancer and said there was a high probability that “the excess cancers are attributable to the release of radioactive iodine.”
    Cancers, miscarriages and other health problems suffered by people in the area have been blamed on the deliberate spewing of 5,500 curies of iodine-131 to the atmosphere in a Dec. 3, 1949 experiment called “green run,” and on the offhand dispersal of 340,000 curies of radio-iodine in 1945 alone.
    In 1974, a Dr. Samuel Milham in Washington’s state health department published his finding that men who had worked at Hanford had a 25 percent higher proportion of cancer deaths than for similarly aged men in other work. And in 1977, the journal Health Physics published Alice Stewart, Thomas Mancuso and George Kneal’s finding of a 6 or 7 percent increased cancer effect in Hanford workers.
    In 1990, a DOE analysis of radiation exposures downwind from Hanford found that infants and children were heavily contaminated because of drinking contaminated milk. The Hanford Environmental Dose Reconstruction Project found that 13,500 people may have revived doses over 33 rads of iodine-131 and that infants and children closest to Hanford could have consumed between 650 and 3,000 rads. Even a single rad can cause thyroid cancer and other illnesses.
    Not to put too fine a point on it: Hanford is the tip of the nuclear age’s deadly global iceberg which is spreading to the Columbia River watershed and beyond a plague of cancer and debilitation that may never come to an end.

    *A curie is a very large amount of radiation (37 billion sub-atomic disintegrations per second), and less than 2-millionths of a curie of plutonium is deadly if it gets into lung tissue.

— John LaForge works for Nukewatch (nukewatchinfo.org) which has a rural Wisconsin office out of Luck.