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The Hanford cleanup has been plagued by waste and incompetence. Mandated milestones have been continuously pushed back as contractors encountered unforeseen difficulties. Earlier GAO reports found that although the DoE had spent over nineteen billion dollars over a twenty-five-year period on “treatment and disposition of 56 million gallons of hazardous waste”, no waste was actually treated. This project was originally scheduled to be finished by 2011 with a total cost of four billion three hundred million dollars. In addition to the cost overruns and failure to meet schedules, the waste was stored in a chaotic way that made cleanup dangerous for workers.
Industrial equipment that was used to extract and refine plutonium was stored in underground tunnels reinforced by wooden timbers. Studies in 1978 and 1991 concluded that the tunnels were structurally sound. The DoE should have conducted a follow-up study that might have revealed structural problems with the tunnels, but it did not. In 2017, one of the tunnels suffered a partial collapse. The DoE refused to do a “root cause analysis” which might have revealed the cause of the collapse. The contractor requested that the analysis not be conducted.
The GAO report said, “According to a written explanation provided to us by [the contractor’s] management, while the tunnel collapse was due to structural degradation, [the contractor’s] first priority was stabilizing the tunnel to mitigate the potential for further collapse, and a programmatic root cause analysis to determine the cause was not warranted.” Instead of the root cause analysis, the DoE conducted an “apparent cause analysis”. That analysis concluded that the tunnel probably collapsed because the wooden timbers propping up the ceiling had decayed.
Other parts of Hanford have never had a safety inspection of any kind. Some of these areas were used to store nuclear waste. Some of those areas including processing facilities called “canyons” where plutonium was extracted from uranium fuel rods have not been entered or inspected for fifty years.
U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) castigated the DoE for the way it has handled the Hanford cleanup in a letter he sent to Energy Secretary Dan Brouilletter. In the letter, Wyden states that the DoE has accepted all the GAO recommendations but said that those changes are simply not sufficient to protect the workers and citizens in the Hanford area.
Wyden explicitly blamed the collapse of the tunnel on the failure of the DoE to conduct the comprehensive inspections. Wyden wrote that the tunnel collapse “seems largely due to a failure of [the Energy Department] and its contractors to independently verify the tunnel’s physical condition ― a state of affairs replicated over many years across the site’s facilities.”
The state of Washington has repeatedly had to drag the DoE and Hanford contractors into court to try to enforce promised milestones in the cleanup. The health of some of the Hanford workers has been seriously impacted during work at Hanford. While the workers have been going to court for compensation, the DoE claims, despite evidence to the contrary, that no one has been seriously harmed. In addition, contractors have often broken laws and regulations regarding the cleanup and disposal of nuclear waste at Hanford. Considering the billions and billions of dollars spent on nuclear weapons, it would seem that a few more billion could be allocated to the cleanup.