I have written many posts about the Hanford Nuclear Reservation near Richland, Washington. It is one of the most radioactively polluted areas in the world. After decades of plutonium production for the U.S. nuclear arsenal, a great deal of cleanup still remains to be done. The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) is responsible for cleaning up the site but they have consistently broken agreements, missed deadlines, lied, broken laws and generally behaved in a very irresponsible manner. The State of Washington has been trying to get the DoE to deliver on its responsibilities for years which has, at time, led to court battles.
In a 2010 consent decree agreement between the State of Washington and the DoE, the DoE accepted deadlines for the completion of a vitrification plant by 2022 to incorporate high-level nuclear wastes into glass logs for permanent disposal. In addition, there were also deadlines for removing liquid nuclear waste from single walled storage tanks because the tanks were leaking. The DoE has been complaining since 2011 that it cannot meet all agreed upon deadlines. It is now 2014 and the DoE has missed many of the deadlines specified in the 2010 consent agreement and have announced that it is likely that many more deadlines will be missed. The vitrification plant construction has been suspended because of problems with the design. Single walled tanks are still leaking into the soil at Hanford.
The Governor of Washington, Jay Inslee, "The simple fact is the Department of Energy has failed to meet important deadlines. We need much stronger accountability to ensure our citizens are protected and the Hanford site is cleaned up." He announced a few days ago that the state is going to file a motion in federal court against the DoE. He and Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson are going to ask the federal court to impose new requirements for constructing double-walled tanks to replace the current leaking single-walled tanks.
Representatives of the DoE have said that " We are disappointed that the parties could not agree on a reasonable, achievable path forward...The department hopes for an expeditious resolution of this matter...In the near term, we will continue to move forward as expeditiously as practicable to begin treating tank waste at Hanford, and will continue to work with the state and key stakeholders to accomplish this important mission.” This is the sort of bureaucratic that says nothing. It could have been said by the DoE at any time in the last decade in response to criticisms of its handling of the Hanford cleanup. The citizens of the State of Washington do not need vacuous and generic soothing statements from a federal agency. What the citizens need is swift action and thorough accountability in cleaning up the mess that the Pentagon left at Hanford. With a military budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars, the U.S. government can afford to spend more than the two billion dollars a year they currently spending to clean up Hanford.
Hanford Nuclear Reservation:
