Scientist: radiation rising in Hanford Reach

By The Associated Press

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RICHLAND — A maverick scientist who once sent radioactive jam to Washington's governor claims radiation is on the rise near salmon-spawning areas in the Columbia River.

Norm Buske says he's detected radium-225, a decay product of uranium-233, in the Hanford Reach, where 80 percent of the Columbia's fall chinook salmon spawn.

Scientists from the Hanford nuclear reservation and the state Health Department dispute Buske's report, published last week with a grant from the Government Accountability Project, an organization of nuclear critics that defends government whistle-blowers.

Debra McBaugh, a radiation specialist with the Health Department, noted that the sampling methods Buske used in his latest study are nonstandard and have not been reviewed by peers.

"We've been sampling since the 1960s out there. If uranium (or radium) had been there in large amounts, we would have seen it," she said.

Buske grabbed national headlines in 1990 when he shipped two jars of "hot" mulberry jam affixed with radiation warning labels to then-Gov. Booth Gardner and U.S. Energy Secretary James Watkins.

The berries came from an area along the Columbia near N Reactor, where radioactive strontium-90 from Hanford groundwater was entering the river. In sufficient doses, strontium-90 can cause cancer.

Buske said he pulled the prank to draw attention to contamination at Hanford, the nation's most-polluted weapons site.

Since 2001, Buske has had access to the 586-square-mile Hanford site in an agreement between the Government Accountability Project and the U.S. Department of Energy.

His latest work concerns a Cold War program that produced uranium-233 for nuclear weapons. It takes 159,000 years for half of the chemical's radioactivity to decay away.

Buske surmises that about 22 pounds of uranium may have been dumped in the river at old ferry crossings near the defunct D Reactor.

He suspects it was dumped because it contained dangerous fluoride and didn't meet requirements for on-site disposal in tanks or soil.

Ted Poston, a senior research scientist with Battelle's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, also questioned Buske's theories.

"The notion that someone could dispose of a fuel rod or element in the river is hard to buy," he said, because whoever did it would have been exposed to radiation.

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