“Hesitate, Cogitate, Be Safe,” billboards around the Hanford nuclear reservation reminded workers in the 1940s.
The facility’s overseers, through a combination of wartime panic, indifference and lack of knowledge, did not really take that message to heart.
The result: Seventy-five years after Hanford produced plutonium for the atomic bombs that helped end World War II, radioactive waste is still leaking from the now-decommissioned site.
Steve Olson, a National Book Award finalist who grew up 20 miles from Hanford, tells the story of the top-secret complex and its people in a fascinating -- and disturbing -- new book, “The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age.”
The federal government set up shop in south-central Washington state, about 200 miles upriver from Portland, early in the war. It confiscated the homes, farms and ranches of about 1,500 rural residents, sending them packing.
“Even the dead had to leave,” Olson writes. “The army dug up 177 graves at the White Bluffs cemetery and moved the remains to the town of Prosser on the other side of Rattlesnake Mountain.”
A worker at the Hanford site in 1994. (The Oregonian)
The government sited the vast facility on the banks of the Columbia River because it needed the water. Hanford ran the Adam’s ale through its reactors -- and then sent it, now bulked up with long-lasting radioisotopes, back into the river. Workers also directed large amounts of contaminated water into “shallow depressions in the landscape, which turned into muddy swamps.” The swamps dried in the summer, and when the wind kicked up -- as it regularly did -- radioactive dust blew far and wide.
Hanford became one big toxic-waste dump, with hundreds of landfills scattered around its 586 square miles. Workers put the worst, or “high-level,” waste into 177 underground tanks, “each as big an as auditorium.” The problem: the tanks were designed to last only 20 years -- and started leaking almost immediately.
Hanford’s leaders at the time assumed this high-level waste would be transferred to a more permanent storage solution in the years ahead. Instead, the waste is still in those long-out-of-date tanks.
Hanford was supposed to be a temporary wartime military site. But it grew after V-J Day, with additional reactors being built, guaranteeing that the Pacific Northwest could not be the environmental paradise Ernest Callenbach would envision in his iconic 1975 novel “Ecotopia.”
“Levels of plutonium production were top secret [during the Cold War], which meant that the amount of radiation being released into the air and water also had to remain secret,” Olson points out. “And the need to protect workers and the public often conflicted with the need for production.”
For years, a game of toxic hide-and-seek actually took place on the nuclear site. Hanford workers committed to the facility’s longstanding “need to know” culture secretly released radioactive wastewater, while others on the same payroll played detective -- analyzing the unnatural growth of “underground mounds” in the water table -- in an effort to stop them.
Kathleen Dillon, one of the young environmental engineers charged with chasing down the wastewater dumping in the 1980s, often faced silence from Hanford veterans.
“My water balance [work] probably sounded to them like busy work -- and doomed,” she said. “Everybody knew that the facilities were held together with baling wire and bubble gum.”
Many roads around Hanford are marked with signs warning travelers they're entering a hazardous area. (The Oregonian)LC- LC- The Oregonian
By this point, Hanford had become an environmental catastrophe. Remember those 177 storage containers filled with effluent that was instantly fatal to humans? After 40 years, they had lost more than a million gallons of the waste “into the rocks and soil below the tanks.”
Cancers began to pop up in residents of surrounding towns in “suspiciously high” numbers, leading to a series of lawsuits. But Olson acknowledges that establishing cause and effect here is tricky, because “radiation in low doses, such as the doses [most] people received from working at Hanford or living nearby, is not a strong carcinogenic.”
A very expensive cleanup of the Hanford site is now underway -- and will continue for many years to come, assuming funding keeps flowing. The Department of Energy wants to turn most of the high-level waste in those disintegrating, auditorium-sized underground tanks into “glass logs” and ship them elsewhere. Who knows when, or if, that will ever happen.
In the meantime, Olson advises, you should probably steer clear of the site -- and hope for the best.
“Several of the facilities left at Hanford remain extremely dangerous,” he writes. “A collapsed waste tank, a fire, an earthquake -- many kinds of disasters could spew radioactivity across the landscape.”
The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age
By Steve Olson
W.W. Norton, $27.95
-- Douglas Perry
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