Nuclear Reservation Will Be Refuge

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@earthlink.net>]

Saturday April 10 12:02 AM ET 

Nuclear Reservation Will Be Refuge

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Energy Department will announce today 
that it wants to preserve as a wildlife refuge 90,000 acres once 
used as part of the top-secret project to build the atomic bomb.  

The agency later this month will formally propose designating the 
land in Washington state to be managed by the U.S. Fish and 
Wildlife Service.  

The area was a security buffer for the Hanford nuclear reservation, 
constructed in 1943 for the Manhattan Project to build the bomb 
during World War II. Hanford made plutonium for the nation's 
nuclear arsenal until the 1980s and is now being cleaned up as the 
most contaminated nuclear site in the nation.  

But much of the land in the security buffer has been untouched for 
decades and is considered to be in near pristine condition.

``We want to come to terms with our past,'' Energy Secretary Bill 
Richardson said Friday. ``We created a mess there, we're cleaning 
it up, but now for future generations we want to pay back 
Washington state and that community.''  

Richardson plans to announce the wildlife refuge proposal at a 
news conference Saturday in Washington state.

If the proposal clears all state and federal administrative hurdles, 
the area could become a refuge in November, thus protecting the 
land from future development or agricultural uses.  

Currently, one-third of the slope is being managed as a federal 
wildlife refuge and the other two-thirds is being managed by the 
state as a recreation area. Washington Gov. Gary Locke, a 
Democrat, said he supports managing all the land as a federal 
refuge.  

Conservation groups consider the land, known as the Wahluke 
Slope, home to more than 200 species of birds and more than 40 
rare plants and animals, such as the long-billed curlew bird and the 
White Bluffs bladder-pod, a bright yellow flower that blooms each 
June.  

The environmentalists have been working for more than a decade to 
preserve what they consider one of the last large chunks of high-
quality shrub-steppe habitat in the nation.  

``We think this is just a giant step forward,'' said Rick Leaumont of 
the Lower Columbia Basin Audubon Society. ``For many years now 
there's been this uncertainty of what was going to happen with the 
land.''  

The local congressman, Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., has 
proposed studying the land for development, recreation and other 
uses. Farm advocates wanted to irrigate and plant crops in 20,000 
to 30,000 acres of the slope.  

Now with the slope moving toward protection, environmentalists 
want to try to keep 51 miles of the Columbia adjacent to the slope 
off-limits.  

The Hanford Reach is the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia 
and a critical spawning ground for salmon. It was, like the slope, 
left untouched because of the nuclear reservation.  

Sen. Patty Murray and Rep. Norm Dicks, both Washington 
Democrats, have proposed bills that would designate the Hanford 
Reach as a wild and scenic river and place it under federal  
protection.

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Sandy Perle
E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net
Personal Website: http://www.geocities.com/capecanaveral/1205

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