Friday, March 8, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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The Dec. 10 issue of High Country News includes an article by Heather Hansman, “No Fix for our Nuclear Past,” about the nuclear cleanup process at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state.
In February 1945, the first 100-gram plug of plutonium fabricated at the site was delivered to Los Alamos, N.M., and used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, the following August. That plug, reportedly costing $300 million to make in the desperate haste of WWII, started a process that has now produced a Government Accountability Office estimate for cleaning up the site of more than $100 billion.
The single-shell tanks storing some of the high-level waste, 67 of which have leaked, were designed for only a 40-year life. Washington Department of Ecology manager John Price noted that if you were to pull a shot glass full of liquid out of one of the tanks buried nearby, it would kill everyone within 100 yards instantly. William Kinsella of North Carolina State University said, “We’ve made stuff that will be dangerous for millennia and we deal with it in two-year congressional cycles.”
In 2018, President Donald Trump proposed slashing the budget for Hanford cleanup by $230 million. With such a record of governmental irresponsibility, why would Nevada’s citizens ever consider allowing such materials to be brought into our state?
