Hanford Challenge

219 First Avenue S
Suite 220
Seattle, WA 98104
ph: 206-292-2850
fax: 206-292-0610

Hanford Site

What is Hanford? 

After the end of the Cold War, the U.S. ended production of plutonium for use in nuclear warheads.  One of the government’s key nuclear production facilities was Hanford.  Started in  1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, the 580-square mile reservation hosted nine nuclear production reactors, five plutonium reprocessing facilities and assorted laboratories, storage sites, research reactors and support facilities.

 

 

  • Location and History

    Running through Hanford is the Columbia River, the nation’s second most powerful river, and  a major source of irrigation and drinking water.

    In 1990, Hanford transitioned from production of plutonium through reprocessing spent nuclear fuels to focusing on ways to address the hazardous detritus of nearly 50 years of bomb-making.

    The legacy of Hanford’s plutonium production operations is a staggering quantity of high-level radioactive and chemical byproducts, the worst of which, an estimated 55 million gallons of nuclear waste, are stored in 177 underground tanks.  A third of these tanks have leaked at least one million gallons of radioactive waste into the soil and the groundwater that feeds into the Columbia River.  

  • Legacy

    Hanford has also disposed most of the nation’s low level and transuranic wastes in hastily built and poorly designed trenches and ditches. 

    An estimated 200 square miles of contaminated groundwater underlies Hanford, the result of pumping about 445 billion gallons of hot liquids to the soil (equal to about five days flow of the Columbia River). 

    Today, groundwater plumes of uranium, tritium, strontium-90 and various chemicals flow into the Columbia on an increasing basis.

Challenges of Hanford 

Hanford is a political challenge – the estimated costs for cleanup top $100 billion, and this is to simply immobilize the long-lived wastes that cannot be neutralized or treated in any way to make them safe.  There are technological and scientific gaps in our knowledge for how to handle many of the challenges.  Questions are being raised about the political will to commit the necessary resources to stabilize the site, especially with the onslaught of mismanagement, scandals, corruption, and incompetence resulting from inept bureaucratic control from an agency that was born in secrecy and shielded from accountability for most of its life.

Impacted populations include workers who handle the radioactive and hazardous materials and breathe in airborne emissions; the downwind and downstream public, which includes a five-state area and parts of Canada, the American taxpayer; and thousands of future generations.

The public interest movement at Hanford has played a constructive and important role over the past two decades,  yet less than 2% of the radioactivity at Hanford has been immobilized, and clean up operations have only grown in cost and delay.

 

Hanford Challenge brings a new approach to advocacy and change at Hanford.  Public interest groups tend to work with traditional tools of advocacy, which include researching, educating and organizing a particular community in opposition to another community of interests.  These tactics alone have been ineffective at producing the kinds of positive change that the stakeholder communities would like to see. 

 

 Barrels of Toxic Waste at Hanford

 

 


 

 

219 First Avenue S
Suite 220
Seattle, WA 98104
ph: 206-292-2850
fax: 206-292-0610