Of Leaks and Lies: A Looming Nuclear Catastrophe Threatens the Pacific Northwest

Last week, the Department of Energy, which oversees the aging nuclear site in Hanford, Washington, reported that a tank containing high-level radioactive waste was leaking.  This is currently the third tank we know of that’s releasing deadly nuclear waste into the soil above the groundwater that feeds the nearby Columbia River. This is not a new problem for Hanford, which has 177 of these huge underground tanks that contain 55 million gallons of radioactive leftovers from the US’s nuclear weapons operation. These waste tanks were only supposed to hold up twenty-thirty years, and we’re now going on six decades. Below is an excerpt from my book Atomic Days, which details the site’s sordid history and its extremely problematic future. Sadly, leaks at Hanford are nothing new, nor are the lies surrounding them. It’s a looming nuclear danger that’s bubbling in our own backyard, and I’m scared. You should be too.  – Joshua Frank

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The first sign of legitimate danger at Hanford, at least when it came to the US public’s attention, occurred in June 1973, when a massive storage unit called 106-T at the complex’s tank farm was confirmed to have leaked 115,000 gallons of boiling radioactive goop into the sandy soil surrounding its underground hull. An investigation by the contractor Atlantic Richfield tried to calm nerves by asserting the atomically charged liquid did not make it into the groundwater supply. “It was predicted that the leaked waste would be retained by the dry sediment above the water table,” the report stated. “The greatest depth to which this liquid waste penetrated is about twenty-five meters below the ground surface, or about thirty-seven meters above the water table.” While the science indicated the contaminants did not leak into the groundwater or into the nearby Columbia River, the incident showed that another such accident, and one of an even greater magnitude, could happen at one of Hanford’s other storage tanks.

What was perhaps most alarming about the 1973 event was that not a single person could say exactly how long 106-T had been leaking or what had caused the tank to crack in the first place. In fact, when administrators eventually realized what was going on, they weren’t even sure what was inside 106-T. There was no panic. No major alert to workers, and not even a pithy press release warning the community about what administrators did or did not know. The secretive culture at Hanford was still alive and flourishing.

Workers had first noticed the problem on a Friday, June 8, 1973. But it wasn’t until Saturday, June 9, that administrators began thumbing through their reports and read-outs in an attempt to uncover what was actually missing from 106-T. Even though pages and entire sections were nowhere to be found, the investigating team was able to piece together what they believed had occurred. For a full fifty-one days, an average of 2,100 gallons of gunk had seeped out of 106-T every twenty-four hours.

In total, 151,000 gallons emptied into the soil, which included forty thousand curies of cesium-137, four curies of plutonium, fourteen curies of strontium-90 and other, slightly less toxic sludge. There had also been numerous leaks at Hanford in the early years. In 1958, fifteen different tanks leaked some 422,000 gallons of a similar nuclear waste by-product. Yet the 106-T was an entirely different animal. The 1973 accident was the largest single radioactive waste disaster in the history of Hanford, if not the United States, and unlike the incidents recorded in 1958, newspapers were finally covering it.

MOUNTING PUBLIC CONCERN

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), which oversaw overseeing operations in 1973, came under scrutiny in the press for the alleged mismanagement of Hanford’s tank farm. “The scope of the problem is staggering,” read a Los Angeles Times investigative piece. “It has been estimated, for example, that there is more radioactivity stored at the single Washington (Hanford) reservation than would be released during an entire nuclear war.”

The 106-T disaster also impacted public perception of the safety of the United States’ nuclear technology. AEC commissioner Clarence E. Larson tried to downplay the accident and his agency’s role in the mess, as well as the “implications that large masses of people are endangered.” Larson, and a governmental report that followed, laid much of the blame on the contractor Atlantic Richfield and a few bad apples inside the AEC.

“The bungling attributed to Atlantic Richfield (which has declined to comment on the report) would be unbecoming for a municipal sewage plant, to say the least of the nation’s main repository for nuclear waste,” wrote nuke critic Robert Gillette in an August 1973 issue of Science, two months after the leak was discovered. He continued:

The problem, according to the report, was that the operators who took the readings did not know how to interpret them; and a day shift supervisor in charge of half of Hanford’s tanks … let six weeks worth of charts and graphs pile up on his desk because of “the press of other duties” he said later, and never got around to reviewing them; and consequently a “process control” technician elsewhere at Hanford, who was supposed to be reviewing the tank readings for “longterm trends” received no data for more than a month. The technician … waited until 30 May to complain about the delays, but he nevertheless emerges as the hero in this dismal story. Fragmentary readings of fluid levels in 106-T arrived in his hands on Thursday 7 June, but it was enough to show that something was amiss. The technician put out the alarm, the supervisor confirmed the leak the next morning after checking his records and promptly resigned. All of this, the report says, led to the discovery that AEC officials had previously failed to notice or fully appreciate.

It was the first time the public became starkly aware of how Hanford’s tank farms were a tragedy in waiting, not only because the tanks were old and unfit to store massive amounts of toxic waste, but because the agency and the contractors assigned to monitor them had failed to do their job. But it wasn’t just humans who had failed. The tanks themselves were unsettling and foreboding. One hundred and fifty of these gigantic underground silos were built on a dusty plateau just seven miles from the Columbia River and only a few feet below ground. Hanford’s early history and conceptions around nuclear power, waste, and safety is imperative to understanding the disaster that lay ahead. A 1948 AEC report foresaw a future fraught with problems associated with these tanks, the way they were built, and their location:

Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent and are currently being spent for providing holding tanks for so-called “hot wastes,” for which no other method of disposal has yet been developed. This procedure … certainly provides no solution to a continuing and overwhelming problem. The business of constructing more and more containers for more and more objectionable material has already reached the point both of extravagance and of concern.

In other words, the tanks were a short-term fix to a problem with no long-term solution. They knew they couldn’t just dump the waste into the Columbia River, so piping the stuff into hulking underground tanks seemed the obvious choice to the engineers of the 1940s. The waste was so hot it would boil, not for hours or days or even months, but for decades to come. Engineers hoped a better remedy would reveal itself down the road. Such are the pitfalls of nuclear waste, and over the years Hanford’s reactors produced unfathomable amounts of this steaming radioactive soup.

When the AEC took control of Hanford after the end of World War II, they knew they had to do something to curtail a potential tank waste fiasco, so they developed a system that would keep the tank contents cool, designing contraptions to stir the waste so the hot gunk wouldn’t settle and end up leaking out the bottom. This workaround was imperfect at best. The public first learned of the 1958 tank malfunction in 1968 after a secret Joint Committee on Atomic Energy report was released. But the government knew there had been plenty more. From 1958 to 1965, administrators recorded mishaps at nine different units, and these tanks would continue to spring leaks throughout the 1970s. Some leaks were small, but others were quite large: in total, upwards of 55,000 to 115,000 gallons of scalding atomic waste escaped, followed by the 106-T incident. The tanks were also emptied on occasion to make room for new waste. Between 1946 and 1958, nearly 130 million gallons of waste had been discharged into the soil. Much of this waste went untreated, leaving behind an estimated 275,000 metric tons of chemicals and sixty thousand curies of radioactivity, a portion of which polluted local aquifers.

Image courtesy Dept. of Energy.

In retrospect, the ongoing pattern of leaks, workarounds, and government secrecy ought to have been alarming to anyone who understood the risks. Hanford’s storage tanks were not constructed to last forever, or even a fraction of the lifespan of their contents, and Hanford contractors were well aware of this fact. They knew all too well that an accident did not have to happen immediately. A leak could occur at any moment in the extensive life of the atomic waste the tanks were tasked with holding.

Let’s put it all in perspective. An isotope of plutonium (Pu-239), for example, has a half-life of over twenty-four thousand years. This means that after twenty-four thousand years, half of all the plutonium that leaks out of one of these shoddy tanks will still be as virulent as the day it was first released. Hanford had another big problem. They didn’t have enough tanks to hold all the already existing waste, or the waste they would continue producing. Yet in 1959, despite the lack of storage, the AEC denied a request to build new storage units. It was not until 1964, after additional pleas, that the AEC finally gave the go-ahead to construct new tanks.

Before these new tanks were finally approved, more and more waste was pumped into the older units, creating a host of problems, the most serious of which was that more nuke waste meant more heat and an increased risk of a serious accident. There were no new tanks to which to transfer existing waste had one of the tanks failed. This could have led to a disaster—a narrowly avoided catastrophic event.

By the mid-1960s, Hanford’s lack of tank storage had become a serious conundrum. In the fall of 1963, a nine-year-old unit known as 105-A began to ooze radioactive sludge from a split seam, which stopped leaking when salt was added to its internal mixture. The AEC continued to utilize the tanks even after identifying the cause of the leak, because they didn’t have any extra tanks to house its contents. They subsequently added more waste to 105-A, to a dangerous 10 percent over its recommended capacity. No single tank had ever been filled with so much radioactive effluent. In January 1965, as a result of too much waste, steam began to pour out of 105-A, and the ground surrounding the tank began to quake. It must have been a shocking development, but without new tank construction there was nothing to be done but wait and watch.

Fortunately, the rumbling wasn’t catastrophic and 105-A held. A 1968 comptroller general report noted that only a small amount of radioactivity bubbled out and into the soil. 105-A wasn’t the only case of a leaky tank at Hanford in the 1960s. A contractor report from 1967 disclosed that ten more tanks were leaking and fourteen others were struggling from “structural stress and corrosion.” By the time the public learned about the problem with 106-T, twenty-five additional tanks were decommissioned by the AEC due to suspected leaking. Reports on the storage tanks’ various issues had long been classified due to the secrecy of the Manhattan Project. One such report by the United States Geological Survey (USGS), completed in 1953 and not released for another twenty years, warned that Hanford would have major problems if a better solution wasn’t found for the disposal of toxic processing materials. The study noted the tanks were a “potential hazard” and that their structural lifespan was not known. Hanford supervisors brushed aside such concerns. In a 1959 Congressional testimony, Herbert M. Parker, who served as a manager of the tank farm, said he had no reason to believe the underground storage units would not hold up for many “decades” to come. When asked if there had ever been a problem in the past, Parker replied, “We are persuaded that none has ever leaked.”

It was nonsense, of course. A secret Government Accounting Office (GAO) report from 1968 revealed Parker had lied, and that for years officials had withheld information from the public about potentially disastrous issues with Hanford’s tanks. The GAO report noted that at least 227,000 gallons of waste had bled into the soil from ten different units, the first of which, an alarming thirty-five thousand gallons, occurred six months prior to Parker’s congressional testimony. It was a leak he most certainly knew about. While the AEC was in the habit of dismissing such incidents, they were also keen on ignoring unsavory advice from independent observers. Outside experts continually alerted the AEC that the tanks were not up to snuff. “Current analysis by the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) have revealed that the self-boiling tank structures are being stressed beyond accepted design limits,” read one such report. It also put the life expectancy of the tanks at two decades and, in some cases, even less. Yet the AEC ignored these distress signals in the name of anti-communism. Instead of being reevaluated, Hanford’s processing plants ran nonstop, churning out thousands of gallons of atomic waste every single day to challenge the United States’ Soviet nemesis. The waste had to go somewhere. A crisis as volatile as the scalding sludge itself was cooking at Hanford.

WIND, WATER, AND SHAKY GROUND

While leaks during this period had the potential to be fatal, administrators continued to downplay risks, particularly those posed to the area’s freshwater supply. Hanford operation manager Thomas A. Nemzek told the Los Angeles Times in a 1973 interview that not only had none of the leaked waste made it into the groundwater, but that even if it did, it would take upward of one thousand years to reach the Columbia River, by which time its effects would be inconsequential. Essentially, Nemzek asserted, stop worrying so damn much. But not everyone bought Nemzek’s dismissive rationale. A study by the National Academy of Sciences, the aforementioned comptroller general’s report and other geological surveys all countered Nemzek’s claim. These reports further noted that aside from the groundwater issue and depending on the scale of the leak, radioactive particles could go airborne, which would result in immediate and potentially nationwide impacts.

Aside from radioactivity blowing in the wind, there was another big issue: Hanford sat on shaky ground. As early as 1955, the National Academy of Sciences’ National Resource Council put together a committee, Geological Aspects of Radioactive Waste Disposal, to look into AEC operations. What they found was startling. The committee was not convinced that leaving radioactive waste to sit in the dirt was a particularly bright idea. When looking at two of the United States’ nuclear weapon sites, Hanford and the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) in southeastern Idaho, the committee noted that “at both sites it seemed to be assumed that no water from the surface precipitation percolates downward to the water table, whereas there appears to be as yet no conclusive evidence that this is the case.”

Like the tanks releasing waste into Hanford’s soil, shallow underground pipes at Idaho’s NRTS had released nuke waste into the ground, and as with Hanford, the AEC assured everyone that it wasn’t worth the worry. In their echoes of Herbert M. Parker’s congressional testimony, the AEC was either lying or belligerently naive. Later a 1970 report by the Federal Water Quality Administration proved as much, noting that a leak had indeed sprung from pipes at NRTS, and nuclear waste had made its way into Idaho’s groundwater supplies. Another accident at NRTS, in 1972, discharged 18,600 gallons of “sodium-bearing waste” during a transfer from one holding tank to another. In this instance, an estimated 15,900 curies of strontium-90, a radioactive isotope, also leaked. As of 2006, the accident was still having a negative impact, and groundwater near the site exceeded drinking water standards for strontium-90 (twenty-eight-year half-life), iodine-129 (sixteen-million-year half-life), and technetium-99 (211,000-year half-life), along with other radioactive particles. To make things worse, the DOE’s Idaho branch released a startling report in April 2006 warning that groundwater in the Snake River Plain would “exceed drinking water standards for strontium-90 until the year 2095.” In addition, the DOE cautioned, soil that was used as backfill around NRTS’s tank farm was so laced with cesium-137 that it posed a severe risk to workers as well as the environment. Could the same happen with Hanford’s tank waste?

While not publicly admitting these obvious, well-documented dangers, by 1973, the AEC recognized the long-term necessity of properly disposing of Hanford’s tank waste. The initiated a program to turn the radioactive muck into a solid substance in as little as three years, and according to the AEC, the program appeared promising. The tanks would be emptied and the waste would be solidified and safely stored, not unlike filling up a liquid ice tray, placing it into the freezer, and forgetting about it. At least how the AEC portrayed it to a naive public. Yet there were two big hurdles. One was funding; the other was that converting the tanks’ contents into a stable substance was a hell of a lot more difficult than making ice. In fact, doing so proved virtually impossible, which is why the tanks were filled up in the first place. By 1985, despite $7 billion spent over the previous ten years, no progress had been made in ridding the aging tanks of their contents. Even  so, the storage tank mess was just one of several atomic troubles facing the remote nuclear site.