Tell the U.S. Department of Energy to Clean Up the Mess It Made in Washington

Robert Pregulman is the executive director of WashPIRG, an environmental and consumer advocacy group with 20,000 members throughout Washington.

If you lived next to a toxic waste dump that had polluted your community for over 50 years, and if the entities that ran the dump broke promise after promise to clean it up, would you think it would be a good idea to double the amount of toxic waste that was stored there? Of course you wouldn’t. You would think that dump should be cleaned up properly and safely before any more waste could be stored there because ever since we were old enough to understand, we have all been taught by our parents that we are responsible for cleaning up the messes we make.

Unfortunately, the people who run the U.S. Department of Energy (U.S. DOE) didn’t listen to their parents when they were growing up, because they have proposed a scheme to double the amount of radioactive waste stored at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Eastern Washington despite the fact that they have mismanaged the waste stored at Hanford and turned it into the most toxic piece of land in the Western Hemisphere.

For more than four decades, most of our country’s nuclear weapons were produced at Hanford, which created an enormous amount of radioactive waste, much of which has contaminated the soil in and around Hanford as well as the nearby Columbia River. We’re not talking about a trivial amount of waste here—over 450 billion gallons of radioactive waste have been dumped into the soil and into the Columbia River. That’s enough to submerge the city of Seattle in a lake of waste 25 feet deep. And the amount of radiation emitted into the surrounding air, land and water around Hanford is three times greater than the amount released at Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear accident.

Over the years, the U.S. DOE has made numerous promises to clean up Hanford, but it has yet to make any significant progress toward keeping those promises. In fact, the U.S. DOE has attempted to hide many of the problems at Hanford from the public. For instance, in 1991, the General Accounting Office revealed that a leak reported by the U.S. DOE as 5,000 gallons was really closer to 800,000 gallons, and that the agency and its contractor, Westinghouse Hanford, both knew about it and kept it secret in violation of federal law.

Irresponsible behavior by the U.S. DOE and its contractors continues today. Across the Hanford site, standard waste disposal practice for all but the most dangerous materials includes dumping huge volumes of radioactive liquids into unlined trenches, pits, and wells, and burying barrels and other solid wastes in unmarked dumps.

Shockingly, instead of focusing its attention on cleaning up the contamination that is already at Hanford, the U.S. DOE is planning to double the amount of radioactive waste there. This new waste will not just mean more radioactive waste leaking out of Hanford, but it also means that tens of thousands of trucks will cart waste through Oregon and Washington for decades.

The good news is that Washington voters will have the opportunity to tell the U.S. DOE that it cannot ship waste into Hanford until it cleans up the mess it has already made there. Initiative 297, which will be on the ballot this fall, will require the U.S. DOE to focus its cleanup efforts on dealing with the contamination already present at Hanford instead of importing new waste from off site. It will also ensure that the high-level radioactive waste in leaking tanks is cleaned up to the standards set in state and federal hazardous waste laws, instead of abandoned in the ground, and it will require cleanup of waste previously dumped into unlined trenches, and monitoring of groundwater to detect any contamination that may have resulted.

I-297 is a pragmatic response to decades of deception and ineptitude at Hanford. Quite simply, it gives Washington citizens the opportunity for holding the U.S. DOE and its contractors accountable for the mess they created at Hanford and prevents them from bringing in more waste until the mess is cleaned up.

So remember, vote yes on I-297 this fall and teach the folks at U.S. DOE the lesson they didn’t learn while growing up—Clean Up Your Mess!

Vote Yes on I-297. §