Think Out Loud

Brue Bjornstad has loved rocks since he was a kid, growing up on the East Coast. But his real love and expertise is the Missoula Floods – cataclysmic events that scoured the Columbia Basin, and laid thick deposits of sediments in other areas, washing all the way down the Columbia Gorge and out to the Pacific. These floods also shaped the Hanford area. The lava flows and uplifted mountains also still drive how clean up proceeds at the Hanford nuclear reservation. Bjornstad gives us a geologic tour from an outlook on the White Bluffs overlooking the Columbia River and Hanford.

The Hanford nuclear reservation produced more than 400 billion gallons of contaminated waste over its decades of operation. Workers have been sickened over the years, and some have successfully sued the Department of Energy with help from watchdog groups, including Hanford Challenge. The nonprofit advocates for whistleblowers and workers on the site, and monitors the clean up process, which has been going on for decades. The State of Washington and federal agencies including the U.S. Department of Energy recently agreed to an update on their cleanup plan, and the public comment period on that agreement closed Sept. 1.Miya Burke, Program Manager for Hanford Challenge, joins us.

JJ Williams is the third-generation of his family in the wine business out of Red Mountain – one of the world’s premier viticultural areas outside of Richland, WA. But before the wine business, his family first put down roots in the Mid-Columbia region to work at Hanford. During the Manhattan Project, Williams’s great grandfather worked at the site, and then his grandfather worked on what’s called the Fast Flux Test Facility. It’s September now and crush is on – meaning that all the grapes are coming in to be pressed and fermented into wine. Williams recently got the distinction of being named in Wine Enthusiast’s 40 under 40. We sit down with him in our remote studio on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. 

We’ve talked a lot this week about life and work specifically at Hanford, but not all of the waste stayed there. In the rush to process plutonium at Hanford, plant operators expelled radioactive byproducts into the local atmosphere and waterways.  People who were affected by these radioactive toxins call themselves “Downwinders.” Northwest Public Broadcasting reporter Anna King, who has been reporting on Hanford for over 20 years, joins us to talk about the people who were affected by radiation from the Hanford site in previous decades.

The National Park Service runs three different sites related to the WW II Manhattan Project. The one on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeast Washington was the first full-scale nuclear reactor in the world. The B Reactor features hundreds of nozzles capping the metal process tubes on the reactor face and even a mint-green control room with all its 40s-era instrument panels. But it’s hearing about the human stories of struggle that make the history come alive. Sept. 26 marks 80 years since the B-reactor first went online. We get a tour from Terri Andre, a volunteer docent at the Manhattan Project National Historical Park at Hanford. 

Seattle poet Kathleen Flenniken grew up in Richland and worked as a civil engineer at Hanford in the 1980s. She served as Washington State Poet Laureate from 2012-2014. In her first year as poet laureate, she published a collection called Plume, which deals directly with how her Hanford area upbringing influenced her.  The book explores the history of the site, the death of her best friend's father from a radiation illness, and her childhood in "Atomic City.” Flenniken sits down with us from the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities.

The 56 million gallons of radioactive waste created from decades of plutonium enrichment at Hanford are stored in 177 massive, underground tanks on 18 different ‘farms’ spread out over the 580 square miles of the nuclear reservation in Washington State. Most of the tanks are single-shelled, but 28 of them are double-shelled, which helps prevent waste from getting into the ground. Each tank holds between 55,000 and a million gallons of toxic waste.  The U.S. Department of Energy oversees the facility and is responsible for preventing the contamination of both the groundwater and the Columbia River. The DOE is also in the process of testing its multi-billion dollar vitrification plant, which is intended to bind-up the radioactive waste in glass logs to safely store it. We get a tour of the tank farm from Karthik Subramanian, who serves as Chief Operating Officer of Washington River Protection Solutions, the tank farm operations contractor. And we sit down with Brian Vance, the Department of Energy’s top manager in charge of Hanford to hear more about tank integrity, the status of the vitrification plant and the overall clean up progress.

The Hanford Reach National Monument,  established in 2000, is a crescent of land with the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River flowing through it. It’s also a major incubator of salmon. The Department of Energy calls it “the largest natural animal and plant community in the arid and semi-arid shrub-steppe region of North America.”  The Reach has remained largely pristine, protected from agriculture and development, because it was a security buffer around the central Hanford site – one of the most contaminated spots on earth. But the Reach is still home to a wide variety of  plants and animals, including endangered plant species like the White Bluffs bladderpod and the endangered ferruginous hawk. We get a first hand tour from Mike Livingston, the Washington Fish & Wildlife regional director for south central WA.  

Farmer Alan Schreiber has an alarm on his kitchen counter, and another one in his office. But they are not to tell time, or warn him of impending storms. This alarms warn him that radioactive winds from Hanford are coming. Schreiber’s Eltopia farm is in the shadow of the massive cleanup site, and the alarms are tested regularly. So far, there’s been no problem. And he says he rarely thinks about it. Schreiber farms here because, as he puts it, there’s no better place with such rich soil, abundant sun and cheap irrigation water. Schreiber joins us from our remote studio on the campus of Washington State University Tri-Cities. 

Carolyn Pearce is busy digging up, cutting up and even x-raying ancient glass across the globe for study. Why? She’s trying to figure out the properties of the strongest glass on earth today, ones that have survived for thousands of years. That way the U.S. Department of Energy can be confident in its science to bind up radioactive wastes for thousands of years to come. Some of the glass she’s working with is from a Swedish hillfort, some from glass beads from a burial site in Poland, and some from the Newberry volcano in Oregon.  We sit down with her at our remote studio on the Washington State University Tri-Cities campus.