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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Oct. 23, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Pentagon's nuclear leaks pose grave threat

By John Catalinotto

If radioactive material at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state reaches the nearby Columbia River, it will enter the human food chain and expose masses of people to radiation for centuries.

Storage tanks at Hanford containing radioactive waste and other poisons in liquids have been leaking. Scientists now say this leakage has already reached the ground water.

Department of Energy experts had maintained for years that any leakage would chemically bind to nearby soil and present no danger. Last year, the DOE brought in a team of outside experts. The experts reported in January that the DOE’s former work was inadequate and unrealistic, and that an enormous—and expensive—cleanup was needed.

There are 147 single-shelled tanks in Hanford. All of them are fragile and prone to leaks and even to explosion as a result of trapped hydrogen. The DOE says 67 have already leaked.

The private companies that empty these tanks maintain that they will only be able to pump two tanks next year because of budget reductions.

About a million gallons of liquids have already leaked. As a result, the soil under the tanks contains quantities of technetium 99 and strontium 90.

The latter isotope causes cancers in humans after it concentrates in the bones.

The Pentagon’s nuclear graveyard

The Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs, founded the Hanford Nuclear Project in early 1940. Hanford produced the plutonium for the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945.

Nuclear facilities like Hanford were carefully hidden from the public by so-called national security secrecy.

Today, Hanford Nuclear Reservation is among the most polluted sites in the world. An April 12, 1991, DOE report admitted that more than 5.6 million curies of radiation either leaked or were buried in the ground at Hanford.

That amount is about two to five times higher than the estimated radiation released at the Chernobyl, Ukraine, accident in 1986.

An Oct. 7 statement from the Government Accountability Project shows that those managing Hanford are still taking safety risks and covering them up.

Last May, seven pipefitters—working for Fluor Daniels Northwest, a subcontractor at Hanford since Oct. 1, 1996—tried to blow the whistle on serious safety and health violations at the site. The pipe-fitters refused to install underrated valves in pipes destined to carry high-level nuclear waste liquids from the tanks. They also complained of other dangers to themselves and other workers there.

Management reconsidered and finally allowed the pipefitters to install the correct valves—but the next day told the pipefitters they would be laid off. The GAP filed complaints on behalf of the seven on Aug. 2.

After a 65-day investigation, the Labor Department ruled Oct. 7 that five of the seven pipefitters were illegally terminated. The decision ordered their reinstatement, back pay, declaratory relief and $10,000 each in compensatory damages. The ruling excluded two pipefitters who had quit their jobs in solidarity with the five who were laid off.

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