This has to be one of the strangest places on earth. The number of contradictions forced to exist together here—the Tri-Cities, the Hanford Site, the Horse Heaven Hills, the Columbia Basin—just boggles the mind.
Nowhere else in this (or any other) state will you find the most urban right next to the most rural, the most toxic below the most natural, the most global squeezed into the heart of the most local, the future we posthumans imagine and desire emerging from the most unimaginable and terrifying prehuman past. On this road over here, American Indians drive past bioinformaticians from India. On that street over there, people who can’t stop worrying about how to preserve army secrets (intelligence specialists) drive past people who can’t stop worrying about how to preserve the authentic sagebrush ecology (environmental activists). In some parts of the town, ranches; in other parts of the town, complexes for research programs run by the top universities in the world. In some ways, the metropolitan area is more cosmopolitan than Seattle; in other ways, it’s much more closed, conservative, and patriotic. Indeed, one of the Tri-Cities, Pasco, which has a decent population —54,000 people, the 16th largest city in the state—is, according to the last United States census, 55 percent Hispanic. English is practically a second language here.
Pasco, packed with a variety of Mexican restaurants, stores, newspapers, and supermarkets, is separated from Kennewick, the largest city of the Tri-Cities, by the mighty Columbia River. A bridge connects the cities. Just west of the bridge is the point where the Yakima River meets the Columbia, and just east of it is where another great river, the Snake River, makes its connection and, fused with the other rivers, turns and flows to the ocean—this part of the Columbia River forms the Oregon/Washington border. Also not far from the bridge is the very place where Kennewick Man (“the Ancient One”) was found in 1996. It happened in the middle of summer, during the hyperpatriotic hydroplane races. Out of the many people who came to watch the monsters of human engineering—the hydroplanes exploding river water far into the air, the helicopters hovering over the water, the jet planes roaring across the sky—two men happened to find a skull in a shallow part of the river that’s pooled behind McNary Dam. According to HistoryLink.org, one of the two young men first thought it was a big rock and put his foot on it. The discovery was immediately reported to the authorities, who found more bones and decided to turn them over to an expert, Dr. James C. Chatters. In his short essay “Kennewick Man,” Dr. Chatters explains that because the skull was Caucasoid, he thought it belonged to a man (a settler) who died somewhere in the 19th century. But when the bones were subjected to radiocarbon dating, it was revealed that the man had died in the land before time, more than 9,000 years ago.
Just north of this prehistoric burial site is the tomorrowland of clean energy—Nine Canyon Wind Project. You can see it from almost any part of Kennewick, the rows of giant wind turbines (63 in all) in an area that leads to Horse Heaven Hills. The wind blows from the west, the blades turn and turn, and occasionally a bat is struck and killed. As the excellent, long, and very dry (as dry as this part of the world) research paper “Nine Canyon Wind Power Project Avian and Bat Monitoring Report” points out, not only bats (the silver-haired bat, the hoary bat) but a number of birds (the short-eared owl, the great blue heron, the European starling) have had their lives cut short by these future machines. No good comes without its evil—that is the nature of a universe that has no designer but is a random emergence of particles, effects, patterns, intensities, speeds, and contrasts.
From the hill, you can see the three cities (the smallest of which is Richland), the three rivers, and the toxic nuclear wasteland called Hanford. Up here, we have the dream of tomorrowland; down there, down by Richland, down by the riverside, we have the nightmare of The Day After.
I n December 1941, the leaders of the Manhattan Project needed a place on earth to produce weapons-grade plutonium. That place had to be in America and in a remote part of America. The location needed to have an abundance of water, power, and nothingness. Hanford proved to be this place. It had lots of water (the Columbia River), lots of power (hydroelectricity from the dams), and nothingness (desert, treeless hills, and shrubs). Construction started in 1943, and by 1945, three reactors were producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, one of which, “Fat Man,” was dropped on Nagasaki, vaporizing 40,000 people on the spot. Time passed and seven more reactors were built along the river. The water was used to cool the hot reactors—clean water went in and radioactive water went out, back into the Columbia River—and a tremendous amount of waste was simply pumped directly into the ground, into the nothingness.
After three years of pumping toxic waste into the soil, resulting in a radioactive swamp (as described in Michele Gerber’s Legend and Legacy: Fifty Years of Defense Production at the Hanford Site), the people at Hanford decided to store the waste in massive tanks. About 50 percent of the 54 million gallons of waste in Hanford is contained in 177 tanks, some of which have leaked, or are currently leaking, or are about to start leaking. The scale of the cleanup, which began in the mid-1990s and will not end until the middle of this century, has no match in the industrial history of the United States.
At the heart of the cleanup plan is vitrification, the conversion of liquid waste into glass logs. So in the way that the forests of the Northwest have produced an industry of tree logs, the massive vitrification plant, which is currently under construction, will produce an industry of radioactive glass logs. (According to an October 2009 Seattle Times story, the plant is 50 percent done and will be completed in 2019.) With such a slow cleanup process, one would expect all life in the Hanford area to be wiped out by radiation, but such is not the case. Indeed, the opposite might be true: the slower the cleanup, the better for the wildlife in and around Hanford.
Not long ago, site employees found a number of radioactive wasps that had made their nests with radioactive mud. “Workers excavating radioactive contamination at the Hanford Site in Washington… have been finding thousands of radioactive wasp nests, spawning a blizzard of atomic stingers,” reported io9.com last June. There are also radioactive rabbit droppings. In October 2009, the New York Times reported that a government contractor “spent a week mapping radioactive rabbit feces with detectors mounted on a helicopter flying 50 feet over the desert scrub.” This was in an area “that had never been used by the bomb makers,” but it was inhabited by rabbits that consumed salts in contaminated areas. “The rabbits carried strontium and cesium, which emit gamma rays, back out of the area in their digestive tracts.”
In Arid Lands, a long and informative documentary that concerns the complicated core of the Columbia Basin, one of the two interviewed geography professors, Morris Uebelacker, explains a realization he had while surveying a transmission line that runs across Hanford. He was outside, under the sun, looking at the active landscape, when it suddenly occurred to him that because the area is so toxic, because humans refused to have anything to do with a place that’s packed with millions upon millions of gallons of radioactive waste, the old nature, the original nature, the nature before even manifest destiny, had made a spectacular return. The toxic waste did not kill the shrub-steppe ecosystem, but instead brought it back from the depths of time. Uebelacker calls this recent and bizarre contradiction “the irony of the landscape.”
Uebelacker is not the only person to see this irony. David Fishlock, the recently deceased science editor of the Financial Times, composed a similar picture of Hanford in a New Scientist article titled “The Dirtiest Place on Earth”: “Dimly in the distance, the Columbia River arcs gracefully across a wilderness of grey sand and sagebrush. Outwardly, the scene could not be more tranquil. Rattlesnakes stay out of sight. Elk, deer, coyote, and rabbits abound. Yet beneath this wilderness in the southeastern corner of Washington State seethes one of the world’s great environmental challenges: a vast potpourri of chemical unpleasantness. Cauldrons of highly radioactive soup bump and burp, belching flammable gases. Subterranean plumes of carbon tetrachloride, chromium salts, radionuclides, and other poisons inch their way through the soil towards the Columbia River. A full tonne of plutonium may be lying under the sand, buried among thousands of tonnes of solid wastes.” An environmental heaven above, a toxic hell below; life above, death below; orderly nature above, a human catastrophe below.
This place is still dangerous, but evidently not dangerous enough for wildlife. What’s more dangerous for animals than radioactive waste left by humans? Humans themselves. This is the real horror. Despite all of the radioactive waste out there (over 50 million gallons of it), it’s not as toxic to animal life as humans are. Nature can deal with the externalities of plutonium production, but it cannot deal with humans and their ceaseless activities, their unending desires, their golf courses, wineries, boat races, multiplexes, giant hotels, thirsty lawns, and so on and so on. There are many terrifying things, and yet nothing is more terrifying than man.
B ecause Hanford has been returned to the forces of nature, the area certainly feels ancient, and has about it the silence of the ancient. But the prelapsarian spell is here and there broken by large geometric structures (domes, boxes, tubes). These are buildings for the Energy Northwest Columbia Generating Station (it’s the state’s only commercially operated nuclear power plant), the slumbering Fast Flux Test Facility (it’s in a state of “cold standby,” according to GlobalSecurity.org), and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (the Caltech/MIT project uses lasers to detect, among other things, tiny gravity ripples from the deepest part of cosmic history, the birth of our universe, which is now expanding at a speed that’s faster than light and might be one of many other expanding universes). The reactors that once produced weapons-grade plutonium are farther into Hanford and not accessible to casual visitors (the tours only happen during the summer). But one does not need to pass the Wye Barricade, one of three entrances to the reactors, to know that the terrain in the heart of Hanford is no different than the terrain that separates it from the cities at the base of Horse Heaven Hills.
The stark structures and the giant towers that link transmission lines seem to be not of this world of water-starved shrubs, dry rocks, and slow reptiles, but projected onto the landscape from another future, a failed future—the atomic age’s vision of the time it never made it to, the time we are now in, the time that sees it as junk. Another way of seeing it, which is less historical and more cosmic, is as if some hole or fold in the fabric of time had produced in this area the simultaneous existence of two entirely unrelated periods in the earth’s history—one that is all nature and no humans and one that is all humans and no nature.
Though wild animals thrive and do the whole Circle of Life thing here, they are not for the untrained eyes as easy to see as the numerous reflective, bright green leaping-deer signs on the side of the road—indeed, you are far more likely to run into a sign than into an actual animal. Because there are so many strange things in Hanford, because of the timelessness of the terrain, one would not be surprised to see a bright green sign for a mammoth. Nor would one be surprised to actually see a herd of those monsters crossing the road, heading toward waters by one of the dead reactors in the distance.
In the distance is the dramatic face of Rattlesnake Mountain. It forms Hanford’s southwestern boundary, is 3,600 feet high and treeless, and is one of the few mountains in the region that was not inundated by the great Missoula floods that happened only a few thousand years before the Ancient One was laid to rest beside the river. At the end of the Ice Age, the Hanford area was completely underwater, and the only piece of dry land for miles around was the top of Rattlesnake. At the end of the 20th century, a considerable telescope was built on the summit of the mountain, and humans enlarged and examined light that had arrived from inhumanly distant stars. Some of these stars, the factories of the heavy elements that make life possible in this particular universe, were extinct by the time their light hit the mirrors in the telescope. So huge and so god-belittling is cold, deep space.
The summit of Rattlesnake is not only the home for UFO sightings and speculations about secret military bases, it is also the home of some of the strongest winds in the region. The U.S. Department of Energy’s website states that the meteorology equipment on the hill has recorded 150 mile per hour winds. Those winds are no laughing matter. They blow massive clouds of dust across the region and bring all life to a dangerous standstill. Alison Schwerzler—a linguist who moved to the area two years ago from Seattle, currently lives near the east entrance of Hanford (she drives by it twice a day), and is writing a memoir concerning her experiences of the region of contradictions—has this to say about the windstorms: “Living in a city is easier. I never had to drive through a dust storm that completely obscured miles of road before, not knowing if an apple truck is going 35 in front of me or if a pickup truck is coming up behind me at 80.”
During the peak of Hanford’s plutonium production, the windstorms were even worse because construction work had removed a good amount of the shrubbery that covered and contained the desert floor. When the winds came down from the mountain, they would become a great radioactive cloud that crossed the desert and reached and poisoned humans in nearby farms and towns. The poisoning was not immediate but gradual, and not always just accidentally carried by dust but also directly and secretly released into the atmosphere by scientists. And the radiation would fall, cover the ground, enter plants that were eaten by the cows, and enter the cows’ milk that was consumed by humans—you are not only what you eat, but also what what you eat eats.
Some of the people who drank this poisonous milk or swallowed the dangerous dust were transformed into a race called downwinders. This race of humans is very familiar with two institutions: the hospital and the court. They go to the former for the treatment of cancers, sterility, birth defects, and genetic mutations; they go to the latter to struggle for some justice and recognition from the source of their suffering, the United States government.
E ast of Richland, there is a strange island. It’s on the Columbia River and connected to the mainland by a slim land bridge. For much of its recent history, Clover Island was used as a dump site for construction waste and concrete. During this period, which came to an end around the 1970s, a cloud of dust would often rise from the island and hang over the river. Today, the island is being redeveloped into a consumer paradise. Clover Island already has a yacht club, a hotel, a fancy restaurant, and a marina. The developers want to pack more businesses and recreational facilities onto the island and the shoreline it faces to the south.
“The vision for this area includes an IMAX theater, a gondola, a carousel, restaurants, a public plaza, pathways, and riverfront restaurants and buildings with a mix of commercial, retail, and residential overlooking an existing urban wildlife area,” wrote John Fetterolf, the Pasco branch manager for HDJ Design Group, in the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce.
On the day I visited the island, it was practically empty. There were no other cars there but my own and one owned by a couple I was visiting, Matt and Melissa. They live in Kennewick and work at the community college in Pasco. Both are in the humanities, both are in their late 30s, and both have complicated views about the area.
We were drinking local wine in the only open restaurant on the island, Cedars. I asked about the downwinders.
“There is a dull apathy about safety at Hanford,” said Matt. “But you have to remember that this county, Benton, and its neighbors are overwhelmingly, single-mindedly conservative and thus inclined to discount environmental concerns as liberal fearmongering. I believe that the citizens of this area, for the most part, have simply forgotten that what lives upriver has really nasty teeth.”
“Are you worried about your own health?” I asked, looking at him and then the moving water flowing by, flowing to the ocean, flowing to the mighty mother of us all.
“Yes, but still. It’s hard to explain. There are a lot of things we just don’t know. For example, there is a train that I can hear from our house. It does not merely move at night; it crawls during daylight hours, too. A short train, traveling at a low rate of speed.” Is it carrying toxic waste? “For all I know, it carries overripe potatoes.”
“Have you visited Hanford?” I asked.
“Yeah, they have tours in the summer. People can go all the way to the reactors. We took the tour last year. It was very strange.” (The tours, which are five hours long and free, began last week but are already booked through the rest of the year. To sign up next year: www.hanford.gov.)
“I remember we were allowed to see a current excavation site,” said Melissa. “The speaker told us that there are layers of buried waste, some of it from the earliest days of the program, and the layers reminded me of a dinosaur fossil site, with various strata showing the project’s time line.”
The growing population of the Tri-Cities feeds on that waste—the two or so billion dollars the federal government pumps yearly into the economy for the ever-so-slow cleanup project. This politically conservative area thrives on welfare. And the cleanup, by the way, will ultimately make the land attractive to developers and farmers—therefore, as with Clover Island, replacing one poison (industrial waste) with an even worse poison (human beings). And what contradiction surpasses this one? The most rational animal in the area is the most toxic animal. 
This story has been updated since its original publication.
Thank you, Charles. That is some beautiful writing.
Recently I attended a dinner party where Hanford was discussed. One of the women had grown up in the area during the 60’s as her dad worked at the plant. She remembers all the kids jumping into the river when they turned on the reactors because the water heated up so quickly.
I have 43 friends with cancer…some from the Tri-Cities area. I applaud your article because as long as this issue is swept under the storage tanks, the number of those facing deadly diseases will grow and our health will be compromised. Why is it so hard for people to own the guilt that puts innocent people in harms way? Or am I just being naive in my utopian thinking? Maybe I should learn to accept the fact that there will always be collateral damage involving the sacrificial few for the betterment of bombs.
It makes me think of a quote by Carl Jung. It is as applicable today as when he wrote it in 1934. “Go slow. Go slow. With every good there comes a corresponding evil, and with every evil a corresponding good. Don’t run too fast into one unless you are prepared to encounter the other.”
Two corrections: You mean Richland, not Richmond. There are 3 restaurants on Clover Island in Kennewick in addition to Cedars: Ice Harbor Brewery and the Crow’s Nest atop Clover Island Inn.
Great read.
I have family who live there – they are just so blase about any Hanford issues.
Union workers make great money – new housing everywhere at low prices.
When I visit two days is plenty – and very hot in the summer.
Good stuff. How could you not mention the RHS mascot though?
Oh brother… Charles, next time just give me a call and I’ll take you up the river to look at all them “nasty teeth”.
Also,
“you are far more likely to run into a sign than into an actual animal”
Don’t know where you got that from. Them dare signs is fer a reason feller!
And airball annie… that is BS about the water warming up. It’s a LONG way up the river from Richland to any discharge point that existed for the production reactors and it’s a pretty big river. Not to mention the rest of your comment being pretty out there.
UHHG… you know, I used to come up to Seattle and people would hear where I’m from and actually ask, and seriously, if I glow in the dark.
Hanford has some nasties… you bet but puhhlleeze with the urban legends.
I grew up not too far from the Tri-Cities before moving to Seattle and only drove through the area to see shows at the Gorge. It only vaguely occurred to me then how strange and beautiful the area is.
I spent a day exploring the area this week. There is a trance-like quiet disrupted only by the sound of the wind, an occasional animal, a very distant tractor…
There are silica mines that resemble white sands, winding trails along the Columbia, 360 views from the top of volcanic rock formations…and radiating toxins silently sleeping just in the distance.
Thank you for writing this, Charles.
Bean, all I can tell you is what this woman told us and since two of her sisters have suffered from breast cancer I listened closely. You can disagree with the logistics of my comment, but in an article called “Downwinders, Still Press Their Case Against Hanford” by DuBey, Martin, and Walton, they wrote, “Such radioactive discharges exposed people who ate fish and waterfowl, swam or boated on the river, irrigated their fields with water from the Columbia or simply drank its water.”
We are probably not going to know the full effect of this for years to come. History is the ultimate judge. There is no study that can cram 50+ of exposure into the initial projected outcome. No, we don’t glow in the dark, but we have one of the highest rates of MS in the country and cancer levels are above normal. And that’s not an urban legend.
A beautiful piece, and very interesting. One minor quibble though, this statement is incorrect: “our universe, which is now expanding at a speed that’s faster than light.” The universe is not expanding at a speed faster than light, according to the fundamental laws of physics nothing can move faster than light (or, well, nothing that moves faster than light can have any interaction whatsoever with anything moving slower than light, if you want to get picky.) The universe is, however, expanding very rapidly, and at an increasing rate.
“This place is still dangerous, but evidently not dangerous enough for wildlife. What’s more dangerous for animals than radioactive waste left by humans? Humans themselves. This is the real horror. Despite all of the radioactive waste out there (over 50 million gallons of it), it’s not as toxic to animal life as humans are. Nature can deal with the externalities of plutonium production, but it cannot deal with humans and their ceaseless activities, their unending desires, their golf courses, wineries, boat races, multiplexes, giant hotels, thirsty lawns, and so on and so on. There are many terrifying things, and yet nothing is more terrifying than man.”
Charles, I have to correct this, it isn’t humans in general that nature can’t live with, it’s CIVILIZED humans. for 200,000 years modern humans lived WITH their environment (as opposed to AGAINST it, like we have done since the advent of agriculture) without destroying it. it isn’t the human species causing the problems, its the culture, the way we live.
Radioactive wasps, radioactive rabbits and their poop. Whatcom County animal sex farm. I hear the Ring Of Fire Is going to serve our state an eviction notice.
Great article, and interesting perspective on the natural wonder of the area. Sometimes people like me who grew up in the shadow of the Hanford site (and who wish it never existed) forget that it is quite naturally unique…radioactive wasps and ants included.
However, there are a few errors. You mistakenly referred to Richland, one of the Tri-Cities, as “Richmond” (which isn’t in the Tri-Cities) in the paragraph introducing Clover Island. And BTW, Clover Island is in Kennewick, not Richland.
@3 and @4, the richland and richmond was an honest mistake. as you can see, i called it richland 3 out of the 4 times it is mentioned in the piece. i know it is called richland. also, i know clover island is kennewick–i wrote “east of richland” and not “in richland.”also, i should have written the only open restaurant on the island. the other two in the hotel were never open during my visit. lastly, the expansion/production of space and the speed of light is a tricky matter. here is one way it is expressed on wikipedia:
“While special relativity constrains objects in the universe from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, there is no such theoretical constraint when space itself is expanding. It is thus possible for two very distant objects to be moving away from each other at a speed greater than the speed of light (meaning that one cannot be observed from the other).”
This is a photo diary of pretty much the same thing happening near Chernobyl. the website is pretty old, as websites go.
http://www.kiddofspeed.com/chernobyl-lan…
Matt and Melissa are wonderful people, I took several of their classes back when I was in high school and went to the community college. Hopefully they affect many more young people as they affected me. I idolized them. Nearly ten years later, I now work at that same college, trying to share the value of education, the environment, and personal responsibility to change this area into a more mindful community.
Thanks for writing this. There are so many myths about the Tri-Cities. This piece may create even more, but I believe as people on the other side of the state and online readers become familiar with its existence the more they will care about it and not dismiss it as simply a red-voting radioactive lost cause.
In an article rife with inaccuracies (radioactive dust storms, forsooth!), you might invest in a map. Almost all your references using a compass direction are incorrect. Paragraphs three and four contain numerous geographic errors. Are the rest of your “facts” similarly muddled?
Charles, excellent article, so glad to see you and The Stranger start to approach the enormity of this topic.
3 points that you left out. First, the Hanford Clean-Up in NOT A DONE DEAL. In fact, the Dept. of Energy (DOE) is taking comments on their new, proposed “clean-up” RIGHT NOW (thru May 3rd) and what they’d like to do spells bad news for all of Washington State and Oregon.
Not only does the DOE want to leave much of the 1.7 TRILLION GALLONS (according to Wa. Dept. of Ecology) of waste that’s been dumped in the ground IN PLACE and just COVER IT UP and NOT remove it; but they are also advocating that Hanford take on NEW WASTE from other places in the future. This seems awfully relevant information to leave out of your article, especially given that people in Washington and Oregon will be living with the consequences of these choices for thousands of years.
To comment on this DOE “clean-up” proposal, go to HOANW.ORG and follow the links. As the DOE closely monitors the number of comments they receive, if you live in Washington or Oregon you need to weigh in on this NOW, or truly ‘forever hold your peace’. And you don’t have to be a scientist to have impact, just tell them you want them to clean up ALL the waste and not bring new waste in.
Even with the most stringent clean-up option proposed (NOT the one the DOE wants to go with) according their own estimates, significant amounts of underground waste will STILL reach the Columbia, so the idea that this land will ever be ‘clean’ and wind up with farms and Stepford homes on it is ludicrous.
Second point. The Vitrification (glass log) plant is currently based on pie-in-the-sky science. There is yet to be a satisfactory final design for the plant – they have started building without an exact final outcome. No one has ever tried to vitrify nuclear waste this volatile, that contains as many chemical unknowns as what’s brewing and burping in those tanks. (Savannah River has a small one working with waste that is much less complex.) In the end, there is no guarantee that vitrification is going to work.
Third point. Not just the rabbit poop is hot at Hanford. Much of the vegetation is hot as well, especially the tumbleweeds, with root systems that reach down into the water table. On windy days, those plants do what Nature designed them to do, they roll all over the place, across Washington and into Oregon.
Also, ever wonder why it’s TV news whenever there’s even a minor brush fire at Hanford? That smoke is sending radioactive contaminates released from the burning brush into the atmosphere, to have it drift back down miles away. They just forget to tell you that part on the news.
And there’s sooo much more. This story is HUGE. Thanks for beginning the journey is such an articulate way.
People get cancer from more than just radiation. You talk about the tons and tons of waste as if the whole land is a festering cesspool of glowing three-eyed fish. Is that what it looked like? You talk about radioactive water pouring out of the back of the reactors – or was this water that never came in contact with any radioactive material like most reactors? How radioactive IS this waste? Will it give you the same amount of exposure as a cross-country flight or walking around outside?
It is reporting like this that makes everyone ignorant of how nuclear power is the cleanest thing we can do for the Earth.
While I think 21 is just being a troll – I just think the piece focuses a little too much on language and not enough on fact.
So, when the hydroplanes come to Seattle, are they still “hyperpatriotic”? Or do they earn some other breathless adjective west of the Cascades?
And, if you saw more green deer signs than deer (or elk, which number in the hundreds at Hanford) you are either near-blind or wouldn’t know one if you ran over it.
And food for thought: The state’s worst radiation exposure case in the last three decades happened at one of your beloved aircraft plants in your backyard. You can look it up.
What sort of witches brew do we have in the land of the tall evergreens?
K in Kennewick
That is crazy that you know Matt! I had to look if it was the same person that I took english 101 from so many years ago. I was in his first class at tumbleweed tech, and he was the first person to show up at my house with 2 dollars for keg money.
Thanks for writing this Charles. I too have many mixed feelings about the Tri, and you covered many of them in this feature.
So much of that area defies rationality, the welfare state of the economy vs. the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” conservatism. I am about 90% sure that the teabagger on cover from last weeks issue is a friend of mines dad from Kennewick. When I confronted him with the fact that he was a retired government employee, on a government pension, with govenment healthcare he just about had a heart attack. The 2-faced mentality of many of the people in that town was enough to drive me to Seattle, and I have never looked back.
@20: i think you bring up a good point in that the cooling water generally isn’t considered radioactive. it is, however, still a pollutant to aquatic organisms who are used to very cold water (and in large rivers like the columbia, they are likely to be living mostly in the littoral zone (near the bank) where this warmer water is likely discharged. it’s interesting that charles just barely mentions all those other toxic chemicals–they are also carcinogens.
i would argue that wind and hydro power are much “cleaner” sources of power (though they come with strong downsides too, from migratory birds being killed by wind turbines to basically all aquatic organisms being negatively affected by the change in flow conditions from dams).
what really disappointed me was the complete lack of focus of this article. based on the headline, i thought it would really discuss ecological recovery at hanford. as an ecologist i would be both interested in and surprised by that, as i would expect certain organisms to benefit from the absence of humans but eventually suffer from cancers and low fecundity just as the humans in the area are. i just have to stop reading articles written by charles mudede–beautiful prose, but no real content.
I’m not really sure where to start. First some credentials, I spose. I lived most of my life in Richland. My grandfather died of cancer (his radiation dosage was high enough for my grandmother to receive a settlement). I was a ‘bomber’ in high school. My father works at a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant. He started out punching uranium pellets in a glove box. I am now a physicist, which I fully credit to the science&engineering worship that goes on in the ‘TC. I never had a chance…
But I swear I have actual comments about the article.
@7, Totally agree about dispensing with the urban legend stuff. They are mildly amusing, but the real stories are fuckin crazy you couldn’t make that shit up! Like the rock-on-a-sting bit from a few years back. If you lower a rock on a string into a waste tank to see if there’s anything inside, dont pull it back up…
Which brings me to the most important topic I wish got a bit more emphasis- how little is known about the waste left at the site. There is a reason the cleanup deadlines keep getting pushed back. Engineers have no records, maps, etc, of what they will find when they begin a given project. Just go in with geiger counters fired up and run away if it gets hairy. Hanford is truly a fascinating experiment, and on a grand scale.
Plutonium levels flowing into the Columbia River are projected to grow to 300 times the Drinking Water Standard (DWS) under USDOE’s plans to dump more waste at Hanford and not cleanup leaks from High-Level Nuclear Waste tanks.
Today, Strontium 90 flows into the River where salmon spawn at nearly 1,500 times DWS.
What YOU can do:
If you don’t want the contamination of the Columbia River to grow… If you don’t want to have our generation leave another legacy of harm to the health of generations of the people who will seek to build homes and use the River corridor for thousands of years… if you don’t wish to see greater harm to the salmon (the 50 mile Hanford Reach of the River is also ironically the last semi-natural spawning ground for chinook salmon on the mainstem of the River in WA and OR)and terrestrial wildlife and plant populations…
Then take two minutes to send in your view on the USDOE’s current plans to
a) use Hanford as a national radioactive waste dump;
b) never cleanup the contamination spreading from High-Level Nuclear Waste tank leaks and discharges, or from the over 40 miles of unlined ditches used to dump radioactive and chemical wastes in the past; and,
c) delay retrieving Plutonium wastes from “storage” in unlined trenches.
These proposals are out for public comment right now. Resources (a Citizens’ Guide, powerpoint explanation with graphics and fact sheets) with links to submit comments are available to you at http://www.hoanw.org
YOU can make a difference if you do more than read this (well written!) view of Hanford and the Tri-Cities. The comment period on USDOE’s “Tank Closure and Waste Management Environmental Imapct Statement (TCWMEIS), in which points a and b are USDOE’s “preferred alternatives” extends to May 3rd. (the projectd Plutonium level in groundwater is from USDOE’s TCWMEIS). Item c on the delay is USDOE and Washington State’s proposal, on which comments begin May 3rd.
You can also sign up for our Face Book group to get updates on the effort to have a nuclear waste free future, and get notices for hearings and meetings in Seattle. http://www.hoanw.org
It’s the 40th anniversary of Earth Day… take a few minutes for the next hundred generations.
Gerry Pollet,
Heart of America Northwest
The Public’s Voice for Hanford Clean-Up
http://www.hoanw.org
Re comments about reactor discharges directly to River:
Hanford’s 9 nuclear weapons production reactors used “once through” cooling. Water from the River went directly over the fuel rods, picked up high levels of contamination – even pieces of fuel from rods that opened – and was dumped straight back into the River. The only exception was that the N-Reactor discharged into two huge ditches right alongside the River. This did not prevent high levels of contamination from flowing into the River because the soil became so contaminated. (The radioactive Strontium 90 leaching into the River from the shore was measured at 1,500 times Drinking Water Standards in USDOE’s annual Groundwater Report for 2008). Until recently, the high radiation from the soil ditches could cause signficant radiation dose to people on the River itself.
A Citizens’ Guide to Hanford’s Hot Spots is available from Heart of America Northwest – email or download from web at http://www.hoanw.org/publications
This was an interesting and well-done article. Folks should know that the government is not done with Hanford. There are plans to dump a huge amount of offsite waste from other nuclear sites at Hanford, and to conduct a “nuclear renaissance” complete with new nuclear reactors and more reprocessing of nuclear fuel on the site. This will only add to the astounding mess already there.
This is a great article. I recently moved here (to Richland) because of my husband’s job and I find it to be a quizzical place on so many levels.
Hanford’s never going away, because no-one else is going to allow a nuclear waste site to be built. Plus, we’re going to start building more nuclear power plants so my advice to the Tri-Cities is: suck it up.
The Richland High School mascot: a mushroom cloud. The slogan: “Nuke ‘Em”
If you are wondering why Pasco has such a high minority population in comparison to Kennewick and Richland, let me offer this fun fact. There used to be a bridge just east of where the cable bridge now spans. It was a green bridge, offering passage to freight and foot traffic. On this Green Bridge was a sign which informed the public that all non-whites had to be on the north shore by sundown. This sign remained in place until the passage of the civil rights act.
Great reading…
I was born in Richland in 1953-at the only hospital in town..
Living in central Richland in a “B” house at first,then on Cedar Street, and eventually in West Richland on a small 1/4 acre lot where my father-an engineer working on both the bomb and on containment ( designing the containers used to ship waste by rail )..my dad designed and helped build our home which still stands.
In the early 1950s we hosted many military members who protected the area-witnessed many events-military exercises with jets and flour bombs-missiles popped up out of the desert floor as unwanted planes tried to sneak a peek at what went on in Hanford,lived through many frightening nuclear attack drills where we ducked and covered our heads.
That was just so we could kiss our ass goodbye in the event a nuclear bomb was dropped on us by the USSR or if a chain reaction spun out of control at Hanford.
Our best friends the Schroeders-had a large tract of land not far from us and OC Schroeder had a Red phone-the real kind as he was some sort of manager at Hanford.If it rang he dropped what he was doing and ran to the phone then off to Hanford he would go as fast as he could.
A majority of our friends who lived there moved away to die of cancers somewhere else.Both my parents have died an awful death-both my sisters have experienced various cancers and I too have skin cancer developing slowly.
All the bad things aside-I truly loved the area in West Richland-it was a magic place-full of mystery-military secrets-hidden things in the mountains around us and UFO’s..but we are not supposed to talk about those things, lol..
The radioactive rats,mice,bees,birds,snakes were constantly causing scares and sirens would sound and we would simply duck n cover never knowing if we were at war or if a rabbit had hopped past a sensor and triggered an alarm.
I miss Richland-now I’m in Everett-an artist but working on building safer aircraft at Boeing.
I miss the barren landscape-probably why I love the great deserts in America. As for the down-winders-I’m surprised that any are still alive
that we knew as kids-most have died early-long ago. But in their memories-I still have pleasures recalling all the glory of the Atomic City where I was born..
Thanks for the great story.
I’m Rob2tall..
Another Hanford irony: to protect the “free world,” and our freedoms such as the freedom of speech, of the press, and of assembly, the town of Richland was disincorporated in 1943 and became a company town with NO freedom of press, of speech, or assembly. When you reached retirement age, you had to move away. If you stayed more than 3 nights in the old Temporary Quarters (now the Hanford House), the FBI came and asked you what your business is.
Richland was first incorporated in 1910, then disincorporated, then REincorporated in 1958. So 2 years ago Richland celebrated its 50th birthday and this year it’s celebrating its 100th! Kind of quirky.
Small correction. the windmills are SOUTH of the river. It’s uphill and intuitively we think of that as being north, but it’s really south. This confuses me often.
@34, south of the site where Kennewick Man was found?
Rob2Tall -thanks for sharing your story. I’d love to hear more…
A major omission is that of the 568 square mile area still part of the Hanford Site, only about 10% of the land surface has contamination – this explains why wildlife flourishes. There are also plant and insect species that are only found on site (because of preserved habitat.)
Myth Busters visited a few years ago and purposely exposed insects to radiation, and they did not mutate.
Some of the Hanford Downwinders have difficulty with their claims because A.) they were smokers, and B.) they were farmers, who used what ever modern chemistry Dow, Monsanto, etc., pushed on them. One of them had to be sued twice by his winery-owning neighbors for using broadleaf herbicides on windy days and damaging their wine grapes. Duh!
(This DOES NOT excuse our Government from secret releases however, just shows another hipocrasy.)
The Windmills are SOUTH of Kennewick. North is flat-ish.
The Hanford Reach is the cleanest part of the whole Columbia. Salmon spawn in the Hanford Reach (because it functions like a river) in vastly higher numbers than anywhere else in the system.
The uranium levels entering the river from the Columbia Basin Project irrigation drains is higher than what enters from Hanford… Ditto what is contributed by the Yakima river to the Columbia. Apparently, fertilizer contains uranium.
RE: Risk, I’ll take my nuclear heritage any day over the statistical chance of being on the Alaska Way Viaduct when the big-one hits Seattle. We can AVOID being exposed to Hanford contaminants now. And I bet our emergency responders are the best prepared in the nation (also because we have the chemical weapons incinerator 50 miles south in Oregon.)
Other west side risk factors include air pollution, noise, and seasonal affective disorder. Ah, the sun is shining. I think I’ll go for a walk next to the sparkling Columbia.
An absolutely fantastic article on Hanford.
Well done (even with the small editorial issues!). I’m a Hanford semi tree-hugger married to an research ultra-tree hugger. However, I have to correct Gerry, as this is yet more blather from your usual scientifically stunted and sensationalized agenda. Lind of like the faked, errr “simulated” photos of your mythical radiation in the 300 area. The reactors, even though “Single pass”, NEVER discharged straight to the river. The effluent was held in the 3-4.5 million gallon retention basins to decay, you know that, and tend to omit that from your barely coherent rants. You also know, as part of your “education” that the retention basin did not pose a threat “until recently”, that threat (if there was ever one) ended in 1989.
It’s debatable on whether Pasco is larger than Richland, but really who gives a shait. West Richland is actually the smallest at 10K souls.
Thanks for a great article!
Always interesting to see an outsiders’ perspective. This truly is an area of many contradictions. Will disregard errors cited elsewhere because you did a good job in covering a lot of ground and minor errors may be inevitable. But the references to radiation-caused illnesses are largely unsubstantiated by fact. The state cancer registry does not show a surplus of radiologically caused cancers, nor are Hanford workers dying by the droves. Downwinders often were farmers exposed to many toxins, yet are convinced their illnesses were caused by Hanford’s documented large releases of radiation. Maybe so, but how does anyone know what caused their cancer? Was it radiation, pesticides, maybe just unlucky genetics? Yet many, including the writer, prefer to blame the unseen, so scary radiation. BTW: you can get a larger dose living in Spokane in a home with a basement seeping radon, or in Denver at higher altitude. I’m not defending the terrible mistakes made in the past during the rush to win World War II and the Cold War, just saying let’s bring a little rational thought to the table, any maybe a few facts too.
I agree with the salutory comments about the interesting use of language. Your prose shows promise, but the journalism aspect could be stronger. Maybe the irony is that you traveled to the TC and talked to expatriated West-Side English teachers. Suggest you make it a TC (not Hanford) series, and come back to talk to a Native American, a Mexican, a Ukrainian, a Mennonite, a Hanford engineer, an Areva reactor designer, a UCLA astrophysicist, and a Pacific Northwest theoretical chemist. They are all at the Pasco Farmer’s Market every Saturday. You would find less paranoia and more passion, encompassing urgent local and world issues, but including great food and wine.
your my new favorite stranger writer; thanks
Great, informative article. Thank you.
I’m now pondering the irony of a weapon that damages the user as significantly as those it is used against.
I’ve worked at Hanford for about 20 years now and I am still amazed at some of the things I find. The comment about people and animals coexisting reminded me of the Bison kill site in one of the central Hanford dunes. There were Buffalo at Hanford before the native americans killed them off. I think they were gone before the horses arrived from the Spanish based on the age of the site. My 86 year old neighbor says he can remember the Yakama’s coming through his dad’s ranch with their thousands of horses on their way to the huckleberry and camas grounds above Kittitas. It was a line that lasted for three days. He also remembers walking across the Columbia River during the summer at Pasco before the dams. The same fate can be said for antelope. Their bones are often found in the middens on Hanford. There was no record of either large game animal in the Lewis and Clark journal. Antelope were reintroduced in the 1950’s from Oregon but were soon poached to extinction again in Washington. There are still some down at the Hermiston Army Depot in Oregon. Sharp tail grouse and sage grouse were mentioned by L&C but, they are not found on Hanford anymore either. Sage Grouse are found a mile or two away. Things change.