Sue Prent, Author

If the Department of Energy (DOE), the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and other federal agencies cannot solve a problem cheaply and swiftly, they simply define it out of existence – and these agencies have the statutory authority to do so! This is the approach the DOE is attempting to take for all nuclear waste management – including atomic bomb waste, atomic reactor waste, nuclear weapons manufacturing waste, atomic test laboratories, and uranium mining waste. At least one or more such facilities exist in almost every state in the U.S.

Prior to his appointment as U.S. Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, wasn’t even aware that the DOE was responsible for oversight of nuclear weapons and regulatory control of all nuclear materials within the United States. Therefore it is no surprise to most of us that Mr. Perry had no idea of the exorbitant costs associated with the clean-up and safe disposal of all atomic waste encompassing everything from atomic test labs and bomb making facilities to the final disposal of America’s worn-out power reactors and their highly radioactive parts and fuel.

According to The Columbian, Perry was shocked…SHOCKED, I tell you…when he learned of the escalating cost of clean-up at the most contaminated spot in the country, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington State. The Columbian continued:

“At the end of January, a new life cycle cost and schedule report was released by the Department of Energy, putting the estimated remaining cost of Hanford clean up, plus several years of monitoring, at $323 billion to $677 billion.”

Fairewinds readers are no doubt more familiar with the Hanford site than was the newly minted Secretary of Energy, and know that Hanford was the site where some of our nation’s earliest atomic bombs and reactors were developed and tested.

Ever since the mid-twentieth century, Hanford has been central to our nation’s quandary over what to do with the unique problem of nuclear waste and which presents ever new and vexing toxicities as it takes thousands and thousands of years to fully decay away. Hanford has roughly 56-million-gallons of the deadly radioactive sludge on its site. It’s been 80-years since Hanford started producing plutonium for nuclear weapons and atomic bombs, and while the facility stopped production more than 30-years ago, no technology has appeared on the horizon capable of cleaning up or containing the waste.

The Hanford Site workers are ill and have been contaminated by radioactive dust, and the site continues slowly leaking; its poisonous payload inching its way toward the great Columbia River!

To quote the November 21, 2013 issue of Newsweek Magazine:

“The town's pervasive dark humor alludes to a darker past - and a troubling, radioactive present. The plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki [August 9, 1945] came from what's known today as the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, around which Richland grew and thrived. During the Cold War, Hanford churned out plutonium for our nuclear arsenal. Then the Soviet threat ended, and the residents in this corner of eastern Washington were left with what is routinely called the most toxic place in the Western Hemisphere. Today, it is not a Soviet missile that threatens this once-pristine high desert. If disaster strikes Richland, it will be because the federal government (namely, the Department of Energy) allowed 56 million gallons of radioactive waste to fester in this sandy soil, where some say it is rife for an explosion. And, critics charge, the DOE has watched its prime contractor on the site, Bechtel, grossly overcharge the American public for a waste-treatment plant so poorly built that, once it's finished (if it ever gets finished), feeding nuclear material through it could cause a catastrophe.”

Of course, Secretary Perry’s reaction to the mess he had inherited from all DOE predecessors was to blame the messenger, objecting loudly to the skyrocketing cost of waste management and cleanup at Hanford. Having no science background that could prepare him to understand the nature of radiation and how it evolves, he apparently has decided that nuclear waste can simply be “managed” out of existence. For this mind-boggling feat of gross malpractice, it helps to have a collaborator as ignorant and unprincipled as the Secretary himself…