SPOKANE — The last of nine nuclear reactor fuel basins on the Hanford Site was stabilized early last week.
As part of the Manhattan project during World War II, the U.S. Government built the world’s first full -scale nuclear production reactor — the B reactor — in Richland in 1944.
Cerise Peck, spokesperson for the Department of Energy, said that preventing contaminated water from making its way into the Columbia River was the major purpose of the work.
“The K Basin was a key project in our risk reduction portion of our mission, and filling that with grout and removing the water was great progress for us,” Peck said.
The full Hanford mission for the Department of Energy is to treat tank waste and remediate the environment.
The location of the plutonium production plant originally was chosen due to its proximity to the Columbia River, along with the low populations in the area, Hanford site manager with the National Park Service Rebecca Burghart said. A number of farmers and Indigenous Americans were displaced for the project, however. Another other eight reactors went up in the following years, spread across the 580 -square -mile site.
For about 30 years, the site produced plutonium to be used in atomic weapons, some of which was used in the “Fat Man” bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. Plutonium production on the site persisted as the U.S. entered into the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, leaving a massive amount of waste as the plutonium was separated from uranium, said Burghart.
“One way to look at it is you would get a kitten’s size of plutonium out of an elephant -sized pile of uranium,” Burghart said. “It’s that chemical separations process, it creates a lot of waste.”
Now, more than 30 years after the end of plutonium production on the site, the last fuel basin has been stabilized by the Central Plateau Cleanup Company, contracted by the U.S. Department of Energy. Stabilization entailed draining nearly 1 million gallons of contaminated water from the basin, and then covering the contaminated debris left over with grout to mitigate it’s harmful effects, according to the Department of Energy.
The cleanup efforts at Hanford have long been a topic of contention. State Rep. Gerry Pollet, D-Seattle, founder of the Heart of America Northwest organization, said although the K basin being stabilized was “terrific,” it has come too late.
“For 25 years this has been identified as a huge priority. It was supposed to have the waste removed from the basin to end the risk of a catastrophe and protect the Columbia River,” Pollet said. “It was supposed to happen 20 years ago.”
The Heart of America Northwest is the oldest and largest Hanford cleanup advocacy group in the region with 6,000 members, Pollet said. Twenty years ago, Pollet said that concern over Hanford becoming a national radioactive dumping site meant that the group had 15,000 annual members. A modern lack of awareness of the circumstances of the Hanford Site is a major problem when it comes to holding cleanup agencies accountable, he said.
“I teach environmental impact assessment at Western Washington University and teach environmental health at the School of Public Health at UW. My students — 20 years ago, every student who enrolled in college who came from Washington State knew what Hanford was. And today, out of 20 students, I’ll have three who know what it is,” Pollet said. “It’s a huge problem.”
The stabilization of the K basin is not the end of the story when it comes to Hanford cleanup.
Peck talked about dozens of ongoing cleanup projects put on by the Department of Energy, while Pollet lamented the lack of attention given to multiple leaks in underground tanks on the site.
“It’s a very big step forward,” Pollet said. “It’s just taken decades.”
