RICHLAND, Wash. — Here in the place where plutonium production for the nation's bomb arsenal was elevated to industrial scale, in the rolling scrub country of south-central Washington, dangerous industrial pollutants are still getting into the soil only a few miles from the Columbia River.
For the nation's largest environmental cleanup project, a legacy of World War II and the cold war, the announcement last month of six newly confirmed leaking tanks of radioactive waste was added evidence that even after decades of work and billions of dollars in taxpayer sacrifice, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation's risks remain unresolved.
But as Washington's new governor, Jay Inslee, swept onto the site on Wednesday for a hard-hat tour and a briefing, and federal officials warned of layoffs from budget cuts rippling through the federal Department of Energy, the reminder was equally clear, state and federal officials said, that government has always been the real defining force at this place.
Nature might, in the end, bat last at Hanford, in deciding whether the land can ever be healed, but in the meantime government policy and spending decisions are running the bases.
"I'm very disturbed that at the very month that we have six new leaking tanks of radioactive material, the sequestration hits, which could result in the furlough of several thousand people," said Mr. Inslee, a Democrat and a former congressman.
The federal Department of Energy said this week that up to 4,800 workers out of Hanford's 9,000-person work force, mostly employed by private contractors, could be hit with furloughs or layoffs starting April 1. About 1,200 workers were already laid off from late 2011 to January 2013 — unrelated to the mandatory budget cuts known as the sequester — as technical problems slowed down construction of a $12.3 billion waste processing plant at the site. Those cuts have already rippled through the local economy.
"It's nasty," said Joan Nelson, 72, the owner of Rosy's Ice Cream and Diner, a breakfast and lunch spot in Richland, where employee hours have been cut as residents stopped going out to eat as much. Ms. Nelson — she named the place for a doll she and her sisters shared growing up — said Richland has always swung in its ups and downs with the vicissitudes of the federal check. The city was essentially built from scratch as a federal company town for Hanford workers starting in 1943.
"It's a roller coaster," she said.
Her husband, David — in a typical example of the web connecting the town and the vast federal works outside it — is an electrical engineer at Hanford.
Federal cleanup managers, in interviews with reporters who were invited to the site for Mr. Inslee's walkabout, emphasized that the new leaks pose no public health threat to Richland or anywhere else. The amounts are small, less than three gallons a day from the six newly identified leakers, and are far from any underground or surface water that might be contaminated, including the Columbia River itself, they said.
But the uncertainties in financial terms, about how things might proceed from here, and with what tools, are genuine and grave, they said.
"We've got a lot of risks out there — sequestration is one of them," said Tom Fletcher, who administers Hanford's 177 tanks of radioactive waste as the assistant manager of tank farms at the Department of Energy's Office of River Protection.
Mr. Inslee, who has declared a "zero tolerance policy," as regards environmental threats at Hanford — and the federal government's decades-old promise to fix what it broke on the land — said he would be unrelenting in keeping the pressure on.
He applauded a decision this week by the Department of Energy to accelerate proposals to send some lower-level nuclear waste — including material from five of the leaking tanks — to a repository in New Mexico. But those plans also face hurdles in approvals and technical details, and are years into the future in any event, Mr. Inslee conceded, which means the leaks will continue.
That federal spending could retreat even as the need for its continuation is underscored by new leaks, Mr. Inslee said, is the real threat at Hanford.
"Not only will it slow down this process, which we have been waiting decades to get done, but it will also make it more expensive for the taxpayers in the long run," he said, referring to the job cuts. "So this is extremely discouraging news that the Congress has not been able to solve this problem."
No one doubts that the cleanup of Hanford — in scale and technical challenge, and therefore, cost — is anything but daunting. Nine nuclear reactors, producing plutonium for bombs — from the one that exploded over Nagasaki in 1945, to the ballistic missile stockpiles of the 1950s through the '80s — created waste that piled up year upon year to a total of about 56 million gallons' worth. About one million gallons of that is believed to have leaked over time from 67 of the 149 single-shell storage tanks at the 586-square-mile site.
Part of the problem that has nagged construction of a treatment plant — which would fuse the waste with glass into stable, storable logs for long-term burial, a process called vitrification — is knowing with certainty the composition of the waste that might flow through pipelines from the tanks.
That led to a halt of construction last year at one of the four giant structures, called the pretreatment building, until technical questions could be resolved, said Todd A. Nelson, a spokesman for the lead contractor at the plant construction site, Bechtel National. Work was also reduced on one other building, he said, pending resolution of technical questions and completion of design.
Those kinds of problems have been Hanford's chronic pattern, said Tom Carpenter, the executive director of Hanford Challenge, a Seattle-based watchdog group that has represented whistle-blowers at the site.
"What you end up with is a system that's very good at spending money," he said.
And wasting it: On Thursday, a Colorado company called CH2M Hill Hanford Group and its parent company, a contractor in managing the waste tanks, agreed to pay $18.5 million to settle civil and criminal federal allegations of timecard fraud in billing for years of inflated overtime, the Justice Department said.
Anda sedang membaca artikel tentang
Struggling Hanford Site Awaits New Cuts
Dengan url
https://scienceteko.blogspot.com/2013/03/struggling-hanford-site-awaits-new-cuts.html
Anda boleh menyebar luaskannya atau mengcopy paste-nya
Struggling Hanford Site Awaits New Cuts
namun jangan lupa untuk meletakkan link
Struggling Hanford Site Awaits New Cuts
sebagai sumbernya
0 komentar:
Posting Komentar