By Simone Anter (Jicarilla Apache and Yaqui), Staff Attorney & Hanford Program Director
Originally published in Columbia Riverkeeper “Currents” Issue 1, 2024.
The other day I found myself in a high school environmental science class. Among models of clean energy infrastructure and a bubbling fish tank filled with Chinook salmon fry, 20 young faces glowed in the PowerPoint light. Eyes wide, one student offered an answer to my question, “How can pollution move?” A tentative voice made the answer no less true: “With water.”
Exactly.
Pollution at the Hanford Nuclear Site, both toxic and radioactive, is not passive. It’s active, moving through the environment in water, soil, plants, animals, and people. Active pollution requires active clean up to ensure that it remains contained at the very least, and, better yet, reduced or eliminated.
Active cleanup requires active public participation. This means public scrutiny over stamped-and-approved government cleanup plans. Most ofthese plans rely heavily on “monitored natural attenuation.” That’s engineering jargon for waiting and watching for hundreds of years until pollution breaks down. Other plans, on closer inspection, just make more plans for future plans. It’s the nesting doll of cleanup—a plan within a plan within a plan.
History-Changing Decision for Cleanup
Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy (Energy), Washington Department of Ecology (Ecology), and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—collectively known as the Tri-Party Agreement (TPA) agencies—came to a historic settlement. It was the result of four years of closed door, so-called holistic negotiations, where the federal government and state debated and decided the future of Hanford. No Tribes were involved, nor was the public.
At the center of the holistic negotiation were Hanford’s 177 underground storage tanks, holding a stew of the most toxic, radioactive waste in North America. Under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), Hanford’s tank waste is considered high-level waste because it comes from irradiated nuclear fuel. Legally, high-level waste must be vitrified (i.e., turned to glass) and disposed of in a deep geological repository. Under the settlement, the door is wide open to reclassify this high-level waste, immobilize it in grout, and ship it to another community for shallow burial.
Columbia Riverkeeper has major concerns, it seems that the Tri-Party Agreement agencies have departed from several basic premises: First, the definition of high-level waste under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA), which seemingly opens the door for grouting and shallow disposal. Second, Ecology’s own stated “as good as glass” principle, which acknowledges that glass is a preferable way to immobilize high-level and tank waste. Third, a fundamental failure to pursue the most robust and long-lasting cleanup plans to ensure the health and safety of people and the environment for generations.
What Does Hanford’s Future Look Like?
I’m not sure what the future of Hanford holds. I am certain about the present reality: Hanford’s toxic and radioactive waste, transported via groundwater plumes, reaches the Columbia River. These plumes emanate from the central plateau, from the leaking tanks. I am certain that waste does not change its definition when it leaks out of the tanks into the soil. I am also certain that the liquid, sludge, and saltcake left within the tanks iswaste that is not easily pumpable, making it fairly impossible to completely empty, remove, and grout all of the waste and send it off-site.
What I am not certain about is if the TPA settlement leaves the door open for landfill closure of the tanks, meaning they will be grouted in place, forever breaking down in the soils and leaching radioactivity. I’m not certain that grout is an effective immobilization for this waste. Experts havedescribed grout as becoming a peanut butter sludge, not effectively immobilizing all of the contaminants present. Tests have only successfullygrouted three gallons of tank waste, a far cry from the millions of gallon left in the tank. What about the communities in Utah and Texas that are slated to receive Hanford’s grouted waste? Do they know the risks? Are they properly informed? Have they consented? Have Tribes?
The fact is that money spent on grout is money not spent on efforts to vitrify, still the most stable and durable way of immobilizing waste. Cleanup money is hard to come by . Even Hanford’s historic budget of more than $3 billion falls short of proposed estimates needed. It’s time for the government to invest in meeting its commitments to Tribal Nations who have been disproportionately impacted by Hanford.
I think back to my classroom presentation and the ease with which these bright students grasped the concept of contaminants traveling through groundwater and how to clean that groundwater. I am hopeful knowing that these young people are the next generation fighting for cleanup. I will continue to do my part to reduce the burden that they are inheriting, too, by fighting for a cleanup of Hanford that is thorough and just.