Hanford’s history not comparable to Yucca’s future

Tom O’Farrell, Boulder City

Saturday, Feb. 12, 2011 | 2:01 a.m.

The Las Vegas Sun’s Tuesday editorial condemning the nation’s nuclear waste policy, “Radioactive waste,” is based on a false parallelism. The history of the Hanford Reservation is not the history of the Yucca Mountain project.

Hanford’s goal was to separate plutonium for use in nuclear weapons to end World War II, not to safely store radioactive byproducts. Wastes were disposed of using standard engineering practices of the 1940s. Liquids were discharged out of the plant onto the steppe where they formed large ponds. Later they were piped into underground tanks. The goal of the Yucca Mountain project is to safely store spent nuclear reactor fuel in a secure geological medium.

No studies were conducted to determine the safety or environmental consequences of waste disposal at Hanford until years later. Yucca Mountain has been studied for decades using “the science available” to determine its suitability as a repository, before any wastes are accepted.

Contrary to the Sun editorial’s inflammatory rhetoric, the 600-square-mile Hanford site has not been “horribly contaminated.” If the waste disposal projects on Hanford were canceled, only portions of the site adjacent to the separation facilities or surrounding the reactor areas could not be returned to the public domain because of contamination. Much of the remainder of the site is an uncontaminated federal wildlife refuge. If the Yucca Mountain project is canceled, or if it were completed, the area could be placed in the public domain immediately because there is no hazardous surface contamination.

Using the logic in the Sun editorial, the newspaper would have written an editorial in 1961 arguing that because earlier rocket programs had failed, we couldn’t get to the moon. We did get to the moon, and we can continue to develop, and implement, a safe nuclear waste policy.

The writer formerly managed ecological programs for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory at Hanford and for the Yucca Mountain project.