The Hanford cleanup saga is longer-lived than a chunk of plutonium-239. On the heels of the announcement that the nuclear reservation’s top-two managers are retiring soon, others at the sprawling south-central Washington cleanup site are looking to bring new radioactive waste to the site, in fact recharging the whole Hanford mission.
After doing duty in WWII as the site of the world’s first full-sized nuclear reactor, the raison d’etre of Hanford in the post Cold War years focused on cleaning up the mushroom cloud-sized mess left behind.
Now, according to the Tri-City Herald’s Annette Cary:
The Department of Energy is considering the Hanford nuclear reservation among other sites across the nation for a center to recycle used nuclear fuel, a reactor to burn the recycled fuel to reduce waste and produce electricity and a research center for the project…
The Bush administration has proposed (the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) as a way to reduce the amount of waste that must be disposed of from nuclear reactors, to increase energy production without the greenhouse gas of fossil fuels and to help limit access to weapons-grade nuclear material elsewhere in the world. As part of GNEP’s international reach, fuel services would be supplied worldwide for generating nuclear energy without spreading enrichment and reprocessing technologies.
The program could help bring power to a huge segment of the world living in poverty, said Gerald Woodcock, speaking for the Eastern Washington Section of the American Nuclear Society.
Using Hanford facilities that taxpayers already have paid for makes economic sense, he said.
“Recognize that Hanford can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he said. Cleanup and a fuel recycling program can complement each other, he said.
That’s got some folks buzzing about the possibility of restarting the Fast Flux Test Facility, a reactor that’s been going through death throes longer than a bad actor in a schlocky horror flick.
But there’s been little news lately about the progress of the construction of a gazillion dollar plant (estimates may vary) that will turn millions of gallons of radioactive waste to glass, glass that in theory will go to Yucca Mountain, a mythical repository where old radioactive material retires to decay in peace.
Taxpayers are spending approximately $2 billion a year to clean up Hanford. That’s more money than the federal government earmarks each year for the nation’s entire Superfund program.
If all of this has whetted your Hanford appetite, check out “Arid Lands” a new documentary on Hanford and the Tri-Cities region being shown soon in Seattle and Portland.