RE: Hanford Site cleanup standards

["Dukelow, James S Jr" <jim.dukelow@PNL.GOV>]

Bill Lipton wrote:

-----Original Message-----

From:	William V Lipton [mailto:liptonw@dteenergy.com]

Sent:	Tue 8/26/2003 7:51 AM

To:	Conklin, Al

Cc:	Dukelow, James S Jr; BLHamrick@AOL.COM; RuthWeiner@AOL.COM; radsafe@list.vanderbilt.edu

Subject:	Re: Hanford Site cleanup standards



I appreciate all the inputs to this thread, and am learning a lot.  What

is clear is that to achieve any reasonable cleanup will be expensive.

To actually return the land to an undegraded condition is probably

beyond what we can afford.



That's my concern.  We are now debating how much we can afford to

cleanup.  While this is necessary, and I'm glad to hear that they're

getting the situation under control, the real issue is how we can

prevent a recurrence of the practices and regulatory framework which

allowed this mess to happen.



To blame the cleanup costs on public concerns is the equivalent of a

drunk driver complaining about body shop prices and hospital bills after

he causes an accident.  Instead of investigating body shop prices and

hospital bills, we need to get drunk drivers off the road.



The opinions expressed are strictly mine.

It's not about dose, it's about trust.

Curies forever.



Bill Lipton

liptonw@dteenergy.com



==================



I think it would be useful for Bill to think about the context in which the contamination of the Hanford Site occurred.



The Hanford Site and the Manhattan Project it was part of were part of the effort to win WWII, a time when the national debt of the US increased by a factor of 10 or 20.  I would be fair to say that a lot of corners got cut and a lot of the cut corners resulted in lost lives.  Later development of the site was part of the prosecution of the Cold War.



Most of the air releases on the Hanford Site came in the mid-40s at a time when one reactor and two or three chem separations plants were operating.  In the late 40s, operational and facility changes were made that reduced air releases by a couple of orders of magnitude (primarily addition of silver to the sand filters).  Peculiarly enough, these changes were made without any public input or pressure (since the whole project was highly classified).



Two liquid waste streams came out of the separations plants.  The high-level waste stream was sent to tank farms and the low-concentration waste stream was poured into "cribs", essentially holes in the Hanford plateau sand.  The low-level waste created radioactive plumes that moved toward the Columbia, where the waste entering the river was massively diluted.  The high-level waste mostly stayed in the tanks, although there has been on the order of 0.5 to 1.0 million gallons leaked to soil.  Because of the waste chemistry and the soil chemistry and the fact that the plateau sits 300-400 feet above the highest aquifer, most of the leaked waste has not reached groundwater.



The Hanford site has been described as the worst Superfund site, but it is one where the significant hazards are pretty well isolated from the surrounding population.  There are a few facilities that represent a significant low-probability/high-consequence risk to those of us that live near the site, but they seem to be receiving the attention they deserve.



Hanford site contamination is one of the costs of fighting WWII and the Cold War.  There were other, much less benign, costs -- more than 100,000 US military and non-military deaths in several wars, probably over a million serious injuries, and trillions of dollars spent on military build-up and operations that might have been spent other ways.  Far and away the most significant remaining hazard from Hanford site operations is its contribution and the contribution of similar facilities around the world to the enormous overhang of nuclear weapons in the stockpiles of the US, the other admitted weapons states, and the several covert weapons states.



As one who bears a lot more of the remaining local risks of Hanford site contamination than Bill does, I do not find my share of the overall costs/risks of WWII and the Cold War to be unreasonable and do not find AEC/ERDA/DOE behavior during that time unconscionable.



Best regards.



Jim Dukelow

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Richland, WA

jim.dukelow@pnl.gov



These comments are mine and have not been reviewed and/or approved by my management or by the U.S. Department of Energy.

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