The Hanford nuclear reservation produced more than 400 billion gallons of contaminated waste over its decades of operation. Workers have been sickened over the years, and some have successfully sued the Department of Energy with help from watchdog groups, including Hanford Challenge. The nonprofit advocates for whistleblowers and workers on the site, and monitors the clean-up process, which has been going on for decades. The State of Washington and federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Energy recently agreed to an update on their cleanup plan, and the public comment period on that agreement closed Sept. 1. Miya Burke, Program Manager for Hanford Challenge, joins us.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. On our final day at Washington State University Tri-Cities, in partnership with Northwest Public Broadcasting, we have been here talking all this week about the Hanford site. It is the first place on earth where plutonium was produced on an industrial scale. That production also led to more than 400 billion gallons of contaminated liquid over decades of operation. Some workers have been sickened over the years and some have successfully sued the Department of Energy with help from watchdog groups like Hanford Challenge. The nonprofit advocates for whistleblowers and workers on the site, and monitors the decades-long cleanup process.
Miya Burke is the program manager for Seattle-based Hanford Challenge. She joins us now. Miya, welcome to the show.
Miya Burke: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Miller: For people who are not familiar with Hanford Challenge … I should say that that probably does not include people who are close to where I am now. You’re very well known in the Tri-Cities. But for other folks, can you give us a sense for the role it’s played as a watchdog since it was founded 17 years ago by the attorney Tom Carpenter.
Burke: Yeah. As you mentioned, Tom Carpenter was a lawyer with the Government Accountability Project. And he was working nationwide on whistleblower cases, but he really kept getting cases for workers and whistleblowers at the Hanford site. So he really saw a need to focus wholly on whistleblower cases at Hanford. In 2007, he founded Hanford Challenge and was able to dedicate his full time to whistleblower cases at the site. And we’ve been doing that work ever since.
Whistleblowers do incredibly courageous and important work. In their day to day job, they will see issues, raise those concerns internally, and they will be shunned, ignored or retaliated against. So what they typically do is they’ll come to us with those concerns and what we do is elevate those. There have been concerns of fraud, mismanagement, worker health and safety issues, infrastructure issues, technical issues with the waste treatment plant that have been raised over the years and that we’ve brought to the forefront through different means. Sometimes it’s through the media and through talking with reporters, and that gets the issue out. Sometimes it’s legal representation actually going to court. And then, also if we have a good relationship with the field office manager at the site, we can bring those issues to them directly. Sometimes they hadn’t heard about it, so they can address those that way.
Miller: One of the things that we heard from the Department of Energy and their various contractors is that things have changed at Hanford in recent years, that they’re more safety conscious than they were in past decades and less secretive. I know that you’ve only been there for three years, but I know you’ve also been working with people who’ve been there for a while. Do you think that, broadly, that’s true that something has been changing at Hanford?
Burke: I think yes and no. In terms of secrecy, the Department of Energy was born out of the Manhattan Project, out of the Atomic Energy Commission. And when you’re born out of the culture of secrecy and your identity is tied to secrecy, I think it’s really hard to let that go and move away from that culture of hiding information and keeping things to yourself. So yes, it has improved since the Manhattan Project, but I definitely don’t think it’s perfect. I think we can expect more transparency and more openness from the Department of Energy for sure. I think that ebbs and flows depending on who is in charge.
Then, in terms of safety culture – yeah, it is safe and there are things that are done on site that make sure that workers are kept safe in terms of mock-up facilities. So, for example, there’s this building on site called the Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility. And it has these storage pools that contain caesium and strontium capsules and they’re incredibly radioactive. They’re very, very dangerous and they’re stored in these pools to shield the radioactivity from the workers. We’ve been pushing for these capsules to be moved out of the pools and into dry storage for years, and they’re just now getting ready to do that.
What they’ve done is actually make a facility that looks exactly like WSEF – Waste Encapsulation and Storage Facility. WSEF is the acronym I got when I actually visited it. And it’s designed to be exactly the dimensions of that facility. All the equipment is there exactly as it’s designed and workers are able to practice in this mock-up facility in a completely safe, non-radiological condition. And that’s incredible because they can practice and make sure that they know what it’s like to work with this equipment, before they’re doing it in a radiological environment.
Miller: It’s also striking to think about that as working conditions compared to the unbelievable rush to build the factory and have it be operational, and to actually have the first full-scale plutonium factory up and running in 11 months. Obviously, there was no mock-up there. So that’s an incredibly stark example of how things have changed. Obviously, that’s not a question of cleanup. That was the World War II urgency. But it’s just striking because it’s all in the same site.
I want to turn to some changes that were negotiated in recent years. So the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. EPA (the Environmental Protection Agency) and the Washington Department of Ecology negotiated some changes to their long-standing tri-party agreement. This new accord is called the Holistic Agreement. There was public comment for it over the summer. How do you feel about this new agreement?
Burke: Mixed feelings. So it’s a step forward. They were in these holistic negotiations, which were secret – they did not share any information with stakeholders, the public or the Tribes for four years. We were happy to finally hear what the settlement agreement was, but it still feels like kicking the can down the road. It’s all around the scope and schedule of tank waste cleanup. So they’ve delayed some dates for when they’ll do work on the different facilities that are needed for tank waste cleanup. And it feels like it’s a delay on top of many, many delays.
Another piece of this is that they’re considering shipping tens of millions of gallons of tank waste off site and grouting it. So we’re really concerned around that proposal. We don’t know a lot of specifics. We don’t know if the waste is going to be shipped as a liquid or as a solid grouted form. We do know that the waste will go to either Texas or Utah. But we don’t know if it will go by truck or train, what the route will be. So we have some serious concerns with grout. We don’t believe that grout is an effective method of solidifying and treating the tank waste. These are some of our concerns with the agreement.
Also, they’re making a decision about those tens of millions of gallons of waste by the end of this year … is what is in the settlement agreement. And yet, there is a test, a 2,000-gallon test, called the Test Bed Initiative that is occurring with 2,000 gallons of liquid waste and is supposed to test what it’s like to grout this waste and send it off site. And that test, we’ve been told, won’t be completed until spring of 2025. We have some real concerns with why they aren’t using the results of the test to inform their decisions around tens of millions of gallons of tank waste. And we’ve, in our comments, asked for them to wait until the test results are in to then make a decision.
Miller: I want to go back to one of the things you said. So is it Hanford Challenge’s position that grouting shouldn’t be an option at all, that you want all of the tank waste, whether high activity or low activity, to be vitrified, to be turned into the glass solid as opposed to the cement solid? All of these are about immobilizing the waste so it’s not liquid, but you don’t want anything to be grouted?
Burke: We don’t want tank waste to be grounded. No. So we believe that vitrification is the longest lasting, most protective method for this waste.
Miller: More expensive, too, and slower as I’ve learned.
Burke: Well that’s what some people try to claim for grout, that it’s faster, cheaper and better. There was a grout program at Hanford in the 80s and it was shuttered in 1993. It was due to issues with successfully grouting the Hanford’s tank waste. So this is something that’s really, really difficult. A lot of the studies will look at other sites – Savannah River and other sites – that have successfully grouted tank waste. And yet Hanford’s waste is like no other. It has a really varied complex chemistry. What we know is that for grouting waste that has a complex chemistry, you will need to find grout recipes for multiple batches, endless batches of waste in order for it to solidify. So you need to change and tweak that grout recipe to make it a solid form with the waste in it. And that will be expensive and difficult, and will take time.
Miller: I want to turn to the high activity waste. We heard earlier this week from Brian Vance, who’s the Department of Energy’s Hanford head, the agency that’s in charge of this whole site. He is in charge of it for the DOE. Basically what he said is that, assuming the high level waste can be vitrified, there is still no agreement about where it’ll be stored long-term, meaning thousands of years. But their plan is to keep that on-site temporarily.
I asked if he thought it was possible that, because of the kinds of politics that doomed Yucca Mountain, that temporary storage at Hanford would essentially become permanent. And it seemed like he thought that was at least a possibility. What are you thinking – assuming this is vitrified at all – where it will end up being stored for tens of thousands of years?
Burke: I don’t know where it’s going to end up being stored, but I do know that in order to make a decision and find a place that is adequate for this waste, to store it and to keep it away from the environment and from humans, the place needs to be decided through an informed, broad-based, consent-based siting process. So communities need to be incredibly involved in the work of figuring out where to place this waste and it can’t just be a top-down decision. We’ve seen with Yucca Mountain that’s not gonna work. It needs to be protective of the environment, but it also needs community buy-in and acceptance.
Miller: I mean, we talk about NIMBY when it comes to things that are nowhere close to the most dangerous substances humans have ever created. So community buy-in might be very hard to find. Do you have your own idea of where it should be stored, aside from the process you’re talking about, of ensuring that the community has a real say. Do you have a site in mind?
Burke: I’m not a technical expert to be able to analyze a site that is an adequate place for this waste.
Miller: One of the parts of your job now is education and outreach. And my understanding is that you have been focusing, among other communities, on younger people. What’s the pitch that you give, whether we’re talking about people in the Tri-Cities or, say, 100 miles downstream? What do you tell young people when you’re trying to get them to pay attention to Hanford?
Burke: It really depends on the person. And the challenge is kind of finding what they’re interested in. You can come to Hanford from so many different directions. So it’s something that we do through poetry, we do through a webinar called the Nuclear Waste Scholar Series, where we actually take a step back and look at nuclear waste in general, and topics related to that, and then find how it connects with Hanford. And through that series, we’ve found that more and more people have been showing interest in learning about these topics.
We had an artist on, for example, who did a linocut map of the path that the uranium took from the Shinkolobwe mine to the U.S., through the U.S., eventually to Hanford to be made into plutonium, and then into the bombs that were dropped on Nagasaki and the test bomb in New Mexico. Just these topics that are accessible, interesting and fun to learn about are ways that we get younger generations involved. And that’s so important to us because this is a multigenerational relay race. I am currently in it. We are preparing current and future generations to take up that baton, and keep thinking and talking about Hanford, and paying attention because the cleanup is most likely going to be done around 2100. But this waste is dangerous and will need to be monitored forever. So it’s not something we can just forget about.
Miller: A multigenerational relay race that goes for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
Burke: Yeah.
Miller: Has this job changed the way you think about time?
Burke: Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it’s just you get into your day to day life and it’s all in just what you’re doing that day, maybe what you’re doing that weekend. But just thinking about these long time spans, and also looking back and thinking about the ancient floods and how they shaped the Hanford geology, and how some of that makes this cleanup even more difficult, is really fascinating and is something that I never ever considered before.
But it’s interesting to think about warning future generations. And we find that a fun way to get into this topic is the topic of marking a site, marking Hanford to warn future generations. What does that look like? What do those symbols look like? Is it in English? Are they pictograms? And if there’s also an idea of genetically engineering cats to change color. They’re called ray cats and they would change color when they get close to a radiation source. So there would be songs and lore that would teach generations along the way that if this cat starts to change colors, you should probably run away.
Miller: Is this just a fun thing to think about? Or is somebody actually doing that?
Burke: It was a group in Canada. I think they looked into it. But it’s been years now. And I can’t be 100% certain, but I don’t think they’re actually continuing on with that.
Miller: I’m glad that on day five of our five days here, I did hear about that proposal though.
Miya Burke, thank you very much for your time. I appreciate it.
Burke: Thank you.
Miller: Miya Burke is the program manager for Hanford Challenge. It’s a watchdog organization focused on the Hanford site.
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