The news that Hanford’s double shelled storage tanks holding nuclear waste could possibly explode was not an April Fools' Day joke. And local reaction that “the sky is not falling” and that “flammable fumes in tanks is nothing new to us” ignored the gravity of the situation.
It took Energy eleven years to resolve the problems. Upon completion, in 2001, Craig Groendyke, the Office of River Protection’s flammable gas project manager recalled, “in ’91 we did not know a lot.” The Safety Board’s renewed concern is a stark reminder that we still have a lot to learn about Hanford.
As cleanup continues, Energy will attempt to balance the cost of Hanford’s cleanup versus its benefits. And it is our public responsibility to demand that the cleanup decisions tip in favor of worker safety, a clean river and healthy communities. In order to do this, we must continue, just like the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, to express our concern for new problems, like the waste treatment plant and to ask questions about old problems, like the possibility of exploding tanks.
