A dumping ground? Report raises concerns

By Shannon Dininny
The Associated Press

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YAKIMA — State officials remain concerned the Hanford nuclear reservation will become a radioactive-waste dump, despite changes to an environmental-impact statement for handling solid waste at the Central Washington site.

The state Department of Ecology expressed those concerns yesterday in a letter to the U.S. Department of Energy, which manages the site.

The letter was the first response the state has made to the final environmental-impact statement released early last month.

In the letter, Ecology Director Linda Hoffman acknowledged that the final environmental statement for solid waste addressed several concerns the state raised about earlier drafts, such as burying waste in lined trenches in the future.

"Nonetheless, we have continuing concerns about Hanford becoming a national dumping ground for large volumes of radioactive and hazardous wastes, offsetting the progress on cleanup," Hoffman wrote in the letter.

Energy Department spokeswoman Colleen Clark said federal officials continue to discuss issues of concern with the state. The environmental report, while complete, only offers preferred alternatives for treating and disposing of waste. Final decisions will not be made until a record of decision is released sometime after mid-March, she said.

The equivalent of about 75,000 55-gallon barrels of radioactive waste are buried at Hanford. The material can take thousands of years or more to decay to safe levels. The state and federal governments recently agreed on a long-term cleanup schedule.

In the meantime, the federal government started shipping radioactive and hazardous waste from other sites to Hanford for packaging before sending the materials to a New Mexico plant for disposal. Hanford now accepts and disposes of lower-level waste from other nuclear plants around the country.

The state, Indian tribes and environmental groups have raised concerns that highly radioactive and hazardous waste will be shipped from other states and buried at Hanford.
 
The state has a lawsuit pending in U.S. District Court, contending that the Energy Department failed to adequately study the effects of trucking in the waste and failed to involve the public in making that decision.

A judge has temporarily banned out-of-state shipments of waste to Hanford until the case is resolved.

In the letter, Hoffman said the Energy Department should limit waste that is shipped to Hanford to Cold War-era waste generated by weapons-production or nuclear-research activities before 1992.

"Many Washington residents may be willing to accept some off-site wastes to help clean up this nation's remaining Cold War contamination, but most are not willing to keep Hanford open to off-site wastes from continuing nuclear-weapon and research operations," Hoffman wrote.

An initiative likely to go before voters this fall would block the federal government from sending radioactive waste from other states to Hanford until all the existing waste at the site is cleaned up.

The measure has been endorsed by environmental groups, the state Democratic Party and the League of Women Voters.

The state also said the Energy Department should immediately end permanent disposal of waste in unlined trenches, rather than wait until 2006 as proposed in the environmental statement, and install a system to detect hazardous-waste leaks from unlined burial grounds.

Further, labeling ground water as irreversibly contaminated might be used as a basis to allow further contamination or forgo cleanup, the letter said.

For 40 years, the 586-square-mile reservation in south-central Washington made plutonium for the nation's nuclear weapons, beginning with the top-secret Manhattan Project to build an atomic bomb.

Today, it is the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.

Cleanup costs are expected to total $50 billion to $60 billion, with the work to be finished by 2035.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company