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America's Most Toxic Place !!
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----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: ☮מלח☮
To:
Date: May 16, 2009 4:05 PM
Subject: A Trip to America's Most Toxic Place
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Richland, Washington.
The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation
in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm.
It’s a rolling expanse of high desert sloping toward
the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River.
The “T” stands for tanks—
huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet
beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding,
the lethal detritus of Hanford’s fifty-year run
as the nation’s H-bomb factory.
Those tanks had an expected lifespan of thirty-five years;
the radioactive gumbo inside them
has a half-life of 250,000 years.
Dozens of those tanks have now started to
corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic
material on earth
—plutonium and uranium-contaminated
sludge and liquid—on an inexorable path
toward the Columbia River,
the world’s most productive salmon fishery
and the source of irrigation water for the farms
and orchards of the Inland Empire,
centered on Spokane in eastern Washington.
Internal documents from the Department of Energy
and various private contractors working at Hanford
reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive
sludge have already leaked out of at least
sixty-seven different tanks.
Those tanks and others continue to leak and,
according to these sources,
the leaks are getting much larger.
One internal report shows the results from a
borehole drilled into the ground between two of Hanford’s
largest tanks.
Using gamma spectrometry, geologists detected
a fifty-fold increase in contamination
between 1996 and 2002.
The leak from those tanks,
and perhaps an underground pipeline,
was described as “insignificant” a decade ago.
Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled
up into a “continuous plume” of
highly radioactive Cesium-137.
Obviously, there’s been a major radioactive breach
from those tanks, but to date the Department of Energy
has refused to publicly report the incident.
Even though it was reported by their own geologists.
A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102,
the third largest tank at Hanford, is also leaking.
Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled
container and a broken subsurface pipe into
what geologists call the “vadose zone,”
the stratum of subsurface soil just above
the water table.
In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction Office
of the DOE detected significant contamination
forty-two to fifty-two feet below the surface,
and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers
that the “high levels of gamma radiation”
came from “a subsurface source” of Cesium-137,
which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102.”
This alarming report was swiftly buried
by Hanford officials.
So, too, was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103
and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared
that portion of the tank farm to be
“controlled, clean and stable.”
No surprises here.
The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to
conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford,
a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal
review by the department’s Inspector General,
which concluded that “Hanford’s existing waste
management policies and practices have
themselves sufficed to keep publicity
about possible tank leaks to a minimum.”
Needless to say,
the Reagan years didn’t augur a new forthrightness
from the people who run Hanford.
Seven years and several congressional hearings
after the Inspector General’s report was released,
bureaucratic cover-up and public denial were
still the DOE’s operational reflex to any disturbing
data bubbling up out of Hanford’s boreholes.
By 1987, Hanford officials had learned an
important lesson in the art of concealment:
The easiest way to avoid bad press
and public hostility is to simply stop monitoring sites
that seemed the most likely to
produce unpleasant information.
It is now clear that the tanks began leaking
as early as 1956,
only a few years after the Atomic Energy Commission
began pumping the poisonous sludge
into the giant subterranean containers.
It is also clear that the federal government
covered up evidence of those leaks since
the moment it learned of them.
How many tanks are leaking?
How far has the contamination spread?
The DOE isn’t talking.
It isn’t even looking for answers.
But geologists estimated that the faster migrating
contaminants, such as uranium,
will move from the groundwater beneath
Hanford’s central plateau to the Columbia
in something like twenty-five years.
That means that the first traces of radiated water
could have started seeping into the Columbia in 2001.
This reckless strategy persists.
In a document called
“Official Characterization Plan of Hanford”
—essentially a kind of 3-D map of contamination at the site—
the DOE chose not to include Cobalt-60,
a highly radioactive material that is present
at deep levels across the tank farm.
In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention
the fact that its own surveys have shown large
amounts of Cesium-137
and Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools
in the geological stratum,
called the plio-pleistocene unit,
the last barrier between Hanford’s soils
and water table.
If the DOE remains locked onto this course
it will never acknowledge
or even investigate the potentially lethal flow
of radioactivity toward the great river of the West.
That’s because the managers of Hanford
say they will only research potential
leaks if they detect a level of contamination
several times higher than that ever recorded at Hanford
—a standard clearly designed to shield them from ever
having to pursue any subsurface leak investigation
or publicly admit the existence of such leaks.
To help Hanford’s managers avoid ever
discovering such embarrassing leaks,
the site plan calls for them to drill the
penetrometer holes, through which contamination
is measured, only to a depth of forty feet
—or two feet above the bottom of the tanks,
guaranteeing that they will avoid picking up
any radioactive traces from the region of the
most dangerous contamination.
There’s a reason the Hanford managers want the
public to believe that most of the contamination
at the site is limited to the surface terrain.
Theoretically, the topsoil can be scooped up and,
with large government contracts,
transferred to a more secure site
or zapped into a glass-like substance through
the big vitrification center now under construction.
There’s no way to de-contaminate groundwater
or the Columbia River.
Their only hope for containment is to contain
the issue politically by plumbing the
leaks from whistleblowers.
There’s no question that the subsurface leakage is serious,
extensive,
and dangerous.
The internal survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction
Office detected high levels of C-137 deeper
than 100 feet below the surface
—and sixty feet deeper than the current plan
calls for probing.
That report concluded that both C-137
and CO-60 had “reached groundwater
in this area of the tank farm.”
Consider this. C-137 is a slow traveling contaminant.
How far have faster moving radioactive materials,
such as uranium, spread?
No one knows.
No one is even looking.
The DOE and Hanford’s contractors want to close
down the C Quadrant of the tank farm
and declare it cleaned up,
even though more than 10 percent of the waste
at that site remains in tanks with documented leaks.
There is mounting evidence that a plume of
Tritium-contaminated sludge has recently
penetrated the groundwater there as well.
John Brodeur is one of the nation’s top
environmental engineers
and a world-class geologist.
In 1997,
after a whistleblower at Hanford disclosed evidence
that the groundwater beneath the central plateau
had been contaminated by plumes of radioactivity,
Hazel O’Leary commissioned Brodeur to investigate
how far the contamination had spread.
It proved to be a nearly impossible assignment
since the DOE and its contractors had taken
extreme measures to conceal the data
or avoid collecting it entirely.
A decade later,
Brodeur has once again been asked to assess
the situation at one of the most contaminated
sites on earth,
this time for the environmental group
Heart of the Northwest.
His conclusions are disturbing.
“There remains much that we don’t
know about the subsurface contamination
plumes at Hanford,” says John Brodeur.
“The only way to solve this dilemma is to identify
what we don’t know up front and get it out
on the table for discussion.
This is difficult to do in the chilling work environment
where bad data are commonplace,
lies of omission are standard practice
and people lose their jobs because they disagreed
with some of the long-held institutional myths at Hanford.”
This essay is adapted from a chapter in Born
Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth
(CounterPunch/AK Press).
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown
So Long It Looked Like Green to Me:
the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon.
His newest books,
Born Under a Bad Sky and Red State Rebels:
Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland
(co-edited with Joshua Frank)
are just out from AK Press.
He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair10172008.html
WHY WAIT ~ JOIN TODAY !!!
..
Visit One Earth One People One Chance !
----------------- Bulletin Message -----------------
From: ☮מלח☮
To:
Date: May 16, 2009 4:05 PM
Subject: A Trip to America's Most Toxic Place
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Richland, Washington.
The outback of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation
in eastern Washington State is called the T-Farm.
It’s a rolling expanse of high desert sloping toward
the last untamed reaches of the Columbia River.
The “T” stands for tanks—
huge single-hulled containers buried some fifty feet
beneath basalt volcanic rock and sand holding,
the lethal detritus of Hanford’s fifty-year run
as the nation’s H-bomb factory.
Those tanks had an expected lifespan of thirty-five years;
the radioactive gumbo inside them
has a half-life of 250,000 years.
Dozens of those tanks have now started to
corrode and leak, releasing the most toxic
material on earth
—plutonium and uranium-contaminated
sludge and liquid—on an inexorable path
toward the Columbia River,
the world’s most productive salmon fishery
and the source of irrigation water for the farms
and orchards of the Inland Empire,
centered on Spokane in eastern Washington.
Internal documents from the Department of Energy
and various private contractors working at Hanford
reveal that at least one million gallons of radioactive
sludge have already leaked out of at least
sixty-seven different tanks.
Those tanks and others continue to leak and,
according to these sources,
the leaks are getting much larger.
One internal report shows the results from a
borehole drilled into the ground between two of Hanford’s
largest tanks.
Using gamma spectrometry, geologists detected
a fifty-fold increase in contamination
between 1996 and 2002.
The leak from those tanks,
and perhaps an underground pipeline,
was described as “insignificant” a decade ago.
Six years later that radioactive dribble had swelled
up into a “continuous plume” of
highly radioactive Cesium-137.
Obviously, there’s been a major radioactive breach
from those tanks, but to date the Department of Energy
has refused to publicly report the incident.
Even though it was reported by their own geologists.
A few hundred yards away, a tank called TY-102,
the third largest tank at Hanford, is also leaking.
Radioactive water is draining out of this single-hulled
container and a broken subsurface pipe into
what geologists call the “vadose zone,”
the stratum of subsurface soil just above
the water table.
In an internal 1998 report, the Grand Junction Office
of the DOE detected significant contamination
forty-two to fifty-two feet below the surface,
and concluded in a memo to Hanford managers
that the “high levels of gamma radiation”
came from “a subsurface source” of Cesium-137,
which likely resulted from leakage from tank TY-102.”
This alarming report was swiftly buried
by Hanford officials.
So, too, was the evidence of leakage at tanks TY-103
and TY-106. Instead, the DOE publicly declared
that portion of the tank farm to be
“controlled, clean and stable.”
No surprises here.
The long-standing strategy of the DOE has been to
conceal any evidence of radioactive leaking at Hanford,
a policy that was excoriated in a 1980 internal
review by the department’s Inspector General,
which concluded that “Hanford’s existing waste
management policies and practices have
themselves sufficed to keep publicity
about possible tank leaks to a minimum.”
Needless to say,
the Reagan years didn’t augur a new forthrightness
from the people who run Hanford.
Seven years and several congressional hearings
after the Inspector General’s report was released,
bureaucratic cover-up and public denial were
still the DOE’s operational reflex to any disturbing
data bubbling up out of Hanford’s boreholes.
By 1987, Hanford officials had learned an
important lesson in the art of concealment:
The easiest way to avoid bad press
and public hostility is to simply stop monitoring sites
that seemed the most likely to
produce unpleasant information.
It is now clear that the tanks began leaking
as early as 1956,
only a few years after the Atomic Energy Commission
began pumping the poisonous sludge
into the giant subterranean containers.
It is also clear that the federal government
covered up evidence of those leaks since
the moment it learned of them.
How many tanks are leaking?
How far has the contamination spread?
The DOE isn’t talking.
It isn’t even looking for answers.
But geologists estimated that the faster migrating
contaminants, such as uranium,
will move from the groundwater beneath
Hanford’s central plateau to the Columbia
in something like twenty-five years.
That means that the first traces of radiated water
could have started seeping into the Columbia in 2001.
This reckless strategy persists.
In a document called
“Official Characterization Plan of Hanford”
—essentially a kind of 3-D map of contamination at the site—
the DOE chose not to include Cobalt-60,
a highly radioactive material that is present
at deep levels across the tank farm.
In addition, the Hanford plan fails to mention
the fact that its own surveys have shown large
amounts of Cesium-137
and Cobalt-60 forming radioactive pools
in the geological stratum,
called the plio-pleistocene unit,
the last barrier between Hanford’s soils
and water table.
If the DOE remains locked onto this course
it will never acknowledge
or even investigate the potentially lethal flow
of radioactivity toward the great river of the West.
That’s because the managers of Hanford
say they will only research potential
leaks if they detect a level of contamination
several times higher than that ever recorded at Hanford
—a standard clearly designed to shield them from ever
having to pursue any subsurface leak investigation
or publicly admit the existence of such leaks.
To help Hanford’s managers avoid ever
discovering such embarrassing leaks,
the site plan calls for them to drill the
penetrometer holes, through which contamination
is measured, only to a depth of forty feet
—or two feet above the bottom of the tanks,
guaranteeing that they will avoid picking up
any radioactive traces from the region of the
most dangerous contamination.
There’s a reason the Hanford managers want the
public to believe that most of the contamination
at the site is limited to the surface terrain.
Theoretically, the topsoil can be scooped up and,
with large government contracts,
transferred to a more secure site
or zapped into a glass-like substance through
the big vitrification center now under construction.
There’s no way to de-contaminate groundwater
or the Columbia River.
Their only hope for containment is to contain
the issue politically by plumbing the
leaks from whistleblowers.
There’s no question that the subsurface leakage is serious,
extensive,
and dangerous.
The internal survey of Hanford by the Grand Junction
Office detected high levels of C-137 deeper
than 100 feet below the surface
—and sixty feet deeper than the current plan
calls for probing.
That report concluded that both C-137
and CO-60 had “reached groundwater
in this area of the tank farm.”
Consider this. C-137 is a slow traveling contaminant.
How far have faster moving radioactive materials,
such as uranium, spread?
No one knows.
No one is even looking.
The DOE and Hanford’s contractors want to close
down the C Quadrant of the tank farm
and declare it cleaned up,
even though more than 10 percent of the waste
at that site remains in tanks with documented leaks.
There is mounting evidence that a plume of
Tritium-contaminated sludge has recently
penetrated the groundwater there as well.
John Brodeur is one of the nation’s top
environmental engineers
and a world-class geologist.
In 1997,
after a whistleblower at Hanford disclosed evidence
that the groundwater beneath the central plateau
had been contaminated by plumes of radioactivity,
Hazel O’Leary commissioned Brodeur to investigate
how far the contamination had spread.
It proved to be a nearly impossible assignment
since the DOE and its contractors had taken
extreme measures to conceal the data
or avoid collecting it entirely.
A decade later,
Brodeur has once again been asked to assess
the situation at one of the most contaminated
sites on earth,
this time for the environmental group
Heart of the Northwest.
His conclusions are disturbing.
“There remains much that we don’t
know about the subsurface contamination
plumes at Hanford,” says John Brodeur.
“The only way to solve this dilemma is to identify
what we don’t know up front and get it out
on the table for discussion.
This is difficult to do in the chilling work environment
where bad data are commonplace,
lies of omission are standard practice
and people lose their jobs because they disagreed
with some of the long-held institutional myths at Hanford.”
This essay is adapted from a chapter in Born
Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side of the Earth
(CounterPunch/AK Press).
Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown
So Long It Looked Like Green to Me:
the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon.
His newest books,
Born Under a Bad Sky and Red State Rebels:
Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland
(co-edited with Joshua Frank)
are just out from AK Press.
He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net.
http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair10172008.html
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