New Proposals for Cleaning Up Radioactive Waste at Hanford: Dept. of Energy's Tank Closure & Waste Management EIS
The public comment period has been extended until May 3, 2010 on the Department of Energy's (DOE) "Draft Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Impact Statement" (EIS). The EIS is a critical component of cleanup at Hanford. Located in southeastern Washington along the Columbia River, Hanford's operations once included a plutonium production complex with nine nuclear reactors. Today, we are faced with a nuclear legacy that continues to threaten the Columbia River. Staggering amounts of radioactive and chemical waste are currently stored in 177 underground tanks at Hanford. Many of these tanks are known to have collectively leaked at least a million gallons of radioactive and chemical waste into the ground during operations. Some contaminants have reached the groundwater.
The Tank Closure EIS is a critical roadmap in how the Department of Energy will clean up toxic and radioactive waste that continues to pose a long-term threat to the Columbia River.
Please join Columbia Riverkeeper and our partners across the Northwest in urging the Department of Energy to choose cleanup standards that protect the Columbia River. Federal and state regulators are asking for public input on the EIS, which includes:
- Tank Closure - The EIS examines how DOE will manage approximately 55 million gallons of mixed radioactive and chemically hazardous waste. This waste is currently stored in underground tanks.
- Low Level and Mixed Radioactive Waste - The EIS also deals with DOE's proposals for long-term disposal of low level and mixed radioactive waste at Hanford.
- Decommissioning a Nuclear Test Reactor - DOE is proposing activities to decommission a nuclear test reactor at Hanford.
DOE is accepting public comments on the EIS.
For background information on the EIS visit:
http://www.hanford.gov/orp/?page=146&parent=0
Check out CRK's TC+WM EIS Commenting Guide
Submit Public Comments by May 3, 2010 to:
Mary Beth Burandt, Document Manager
U.S. Department of Energy, Office of River Protection
P.O. Box 1178, Richland,WA 99352
Fax: 888-785-2865; Email: TC&WMEIS@saic.com
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/02/despite_billions_spent_on_clea.html
Despite billions spent on cleanup, Hanford won't be clean for thousands of years
By Scott Learn, The Oregonian
February 09, 2010, 8:57PM
The Columbia River runs alongside the U.S. Department of Energy’s Hanford site, once home to nine operating nuclear reactors that produced plutonium for nuclear weapons. Now it’s the nation’s largest radioactive cleanup site. Some radioactive contaminants at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation will threaten the Columbia River for thousands of years, a new analysis projects, despite the multibillion-dollar cleanup efforts by the federal government.
The U.S. Department of Energy projections come from a new analysis of how best to clean up leaking storage tanks and manage waste at Hanford, a former nuclear weapons production site on 586 square miles next to the Columbia in southeastern Washington.
"We think it should force a re-look at the long-term cleanup plan at Hanford," said Ken Niles, assistant director of the Oregon Department of Energy. "We don't want that level of contamination reaching the Columbia River."
The analysis also shows that the U.S. energy department's plan to import low-level and midlevel radioactive waste from other sites to Hanford after 2022 poses "completely unacceptable" risks, Niles said. Washington is also raising concerns about importing more waste.
The government holds a public hearing Wednesday in Portland on the draft environmental impact statement for tank closure and waste management. Public comments are open through March 19.
Health risks from Hanford's contamination are long-term, not immediate. They're expressed in terms of cancer cases after a lifetime of drinking well water from the site, with a one in 10,000 risk considered high. But many of the contaminant levels at the site exceed health benchmarks by wide margins.
Exposure to lower-volume contaminants with long radioactive half lives, including isotopes of plutonium, iodine and technetium, is projected to get worse over time in some parts of the site as contamination -- most from the 1950s and 1960s -- migrates in groundwater, the analysis indicates.
In the report, the energy department says its preference is to remove and process 99 percent of the contamination in the tanks, excavate about 15 feet underneath them, then cap the site -- an approach that would leave much of the leaked contamination still in the environment. It also favors covering contaminated ditches at the tank farms instead of excavating them.
But Mary Beth Burandt, an Energy Department manager, said the agency is undecided and will likely propose steps to address public concerns. Such steps could include more treatment, barrier walls to block contaminant flows and limits on long-lived radioactive elements in incoming waste.
A preference "doesn't mean the department isn't going to take a look at (public feedback) and say, 'Do we need to reprioritize?'" Burandt said.
Hanford produced nuclear materials from 1944 through 1988, operated nine nuclear reactors to produce plutonium and generated millions of gallons of radioactive and hazardous waste. Some of the waste was dumped directly into ditches, some was buried in drums and some was stored in 177 huge underground tanks, including 149 leak-prone single-walled tanks.
It's now the nation's most contaminated radioactive cleanup site.
Hanford activists want more thorough cleanup of the tank farms and the site in general, saying the cleanup will leave ample contamination at the site and groundwater pollution well above Washington drinking water standards.
"This is a different story than we've been told for 20 years," said Nancy Matela, a Portland-based Hanford activist. "They're saying, we've done our best and we can do it up to this point, but after that we're going to cap it and forget about it."
But more thorough cleanup would cost almost twice as much, the analysis says, and wouldn't show different results for thousands of years. In the meantime, a more thorough cleanup would expose workers to more risk and double the use of electricity, the department says.
A U.S. Government Accountability Office report in September on tank cleanup said the total estimated cost has risen dramatically and could go as high as $100 billion, well above the current $77 billion estimate. The latest deadline for completing cleanup is 2047, though cleanup dates have been steadily pushed back.
The GAO report also questioned whether the Energy Department's cleanup strategy "is proportional to the reduction in risk that cleanup is to achieve," the report said.
Much of Hanford's radioactivity comes from strontium-90 and cesium-137, which have half-lives of roughly three decades, the GAO said, meaning much of the risk should fall relatively quickly.
-- Scott Learn
© 2010 OregonLive.com. All rights reserved.
Hanford hearing: So what about that nuclear waste?
By Guest Columnist
February 09, 2010, 8:00AM
http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/02/hanford_hearing_so_what_about.html
By Jan Castle
Conversations about nuclear power often start with the assumption that the federal government will eventually solve the problem of what to do with the waste. Since the resurrection of the nuclear power industry is back on the table in the discussion over our energy future, let's see how they're doing with that.
A good illustration is found at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, upstream on the Columbia River in Washington. The U.S. Department of Energy has made significant progress in cleaning up Hanford, which is the most contaminated site in the Northern Hemisphere. But the remaining wastes present the trickiest challenges and the greatest threats to public safety and to the environment, especially the Columbia River.
Of particular concern is highly radioactive waste mixed with chemicals, which is leaking from aging tanks into the groundwater and toward the river. In its newly released plan, the Energy Department proposes to partially clean out Hanford's tanks but leave significant waste in them; to not clean up the waste that has already spilled into the ground; and to use the site as a national radioactive waste dump to store additional waste from around the country in unlined trenches.
The agency is holding a hearing this week in Portland to take public comment on this cleanup plan. There are better alternatives, which it will implement only if the public insists upon it. More than once, the Energy Department has changed course in response to heavy attendance at these hearings and testimony from ordinary citizens.
If this plan is not changed:
Plutonium contamination of the Columbia River will grow to more than 300 times the drinking water standards over the next thousand years, just from the waste that is already in the ground or in the tanks.
If Hanford becomes a national radioactive waste dump, thousands of truckloads of waste will be shipped through Oregon communities, including Portland, on Interstates 5, 205 and 84, on its way to Hanford.
If large numbers of new nuclear plants are built, reprocessing of fuel will be necessary to supply them. It is reprocessing that created the wastes that are leaking from Hanford's tanks. The Hanford plant that will glassify the wastes in preparation for storage in an underground repository is eight years behind schedule and $8 billion over budget, and it will be able to process only half of the waste before it wears out and has to be replaced. No sites have been found that are geologically stable enough to serve as a repository.
If reprocessing happens at Hanford, the fuel to be reprocessed will be trucked through Oregon communities in canisters that are so radioactive they must be loaded onto the trucks by robotic arms. By DOE's own estimates, 816 cancer deaths in adults could be expected to occur simply by exposure of passing cars to the radiation emanating from the trucks.
The government's not going to solve the waste problem without public demand, so plan to attend and voice your opinion. And tell Congress that we need clean energy that does not create more of this waste.
Jan Castle of Lake Oswego is a member of Heart of America Northwest, Columbia Riverkeeper and the Union of Concerned Scientists.
The U.S. Department of Energy hearing is scheduled for this Wednesday, with an open house at 6 p.m. and the hearing at 7 at the Doubletree Lloyd Center. The Hanford watchdog group Heart of America Northwest will offer a pre-hearing workshop at 6 p.m. as part of the open house.
This product was funded through a grant from Washington State Department of Ecology. While these materials were reviewed for grant consistency, this does not necessarily constitute endorsement by the Department.
