NUCLEAR BURIAL GROUND

...Commercial nuclear power interests have further plans for Hanford, too, apparently envisioning a massive nuclear energy park within Federal borders...

...When California barred further nuclear power development a year ago, the state energy commission declared, "It is not prudent to continue siting nuclear power plants based on an optimistic assumption that waste management technologies to handle nuclear waste will be developed and scientifically demonstrated...

...In addition, excavation would interrupt static geological history, introducing disturbances into the rock structures...

...Despite informal assurances from Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger that New Mexico would have the right to reject the Carlsbad project, the conservative Republican senator insists that legal assurances are necessary...

...In the past thirty years, Hanford's management poured thirty-one million gallons of "low-level" weapons waste — containing at least 190 kilograms of Plutonium — directly into the soil, at one point prompting fears of a runaway chain reaction...

...Water-bearing layers of rock are interspersed within Hanford's basalt...

...No volume of basalt large enough to host a permanent repository can be said to have zero water conductivity...

...In addition to generic salt problems, there are specific drawbacks at Carlsbad: An earthquake fault passes nearby, and the entire area contains many uncharted potash mines...

...nuclear power plants have already generated thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel remaining on-site in storage pools originally designed for short-term use...

...A consortium of Washington state public utilities has begun pushing for several atomic power plants on Hanford property...

...The process of finding locations for nuclear waste repositories would presumably be greased by the DOE's announced interest in providing "technical and financial help" for potentially recalcitrant state and local authorities...

...Yet the rules proposed by the Department are mincing steps that would do little to lessen the hazards of current practices in which, according to Pollock, "toxic substances are running free on our highways...

...Recent U.S...

...Many of the activists involved in anti-nuclear or anti-militarism work in the Northwest have become increasingly aware that such work may be largely undercut unless the activity at Hanford is seriously challenged," says a founding document of the fledgling Hanford Conversion Project (HCP...

...As physicist Jean-Claude Derian and Hanford conversion Anti-nuclear strategists in the Pacific Northwest are developing a regional network to focus on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation...

...See Page 36) About $250 million in nuclear energy funds annually pour into eastern Washington's Fourth Congressional District, encompassing Hanford, where Rockwell International, United Nuclear Industries, and Westinghouse are major beneficiaries...

...Public utilities commissions in several other states are blocking nuclear plants for similar reasons...

...Utilities have looked to the now-suspended reprocessing program for the recovery of plutonium valuable as fuel for breeder reactors...

...At a November conference in the Washington capital of Olym-pia, about seventy-five HCP organizers mapped plans to promote local ordinances banning transportation of nuclear materials, and decided to devote intensive study to Federal waste-disposal scenarios for Hanford...

...A number of potentially serious dangers have already come to light...

...Thirty-five years after atomic fission became a reality, and more than 5,600 Federal studies on waste manNorman Solomon is a free-lance writer in Portland, Oregon...

...but damage had already been done to the Columbia, the continent's second-largest river...

...The publication argued that this "would create only the illusion of an answer, when in fact no genuine final answer exists...

...Placing emphasis on further research and educational outreach in the next few months, HCP sees economic conversion away from weapons production and the atomic industry as crucial to long-range success...

...The Federal Government has always taken the public relations problems of the nuclear industry to heart...

...In the nation's capital, flurries of high-level governmental reports have now provided President Carter with what he asked for — wide agreement that solutions to nuclear waste problems are in sight...

...Independent polls show most New Mexicans are opposed to waste disposal in the state...

...As chief exporter of nuclear reactors, the United States has said it will require that spent fuel be returned to this country to keep a lid on nuclear proliferation, mindful that Canada's gift of nuclear technology to India enabled the New Delhi government to reprocess nuclear waste into plutonium for atomic bombs...

...From the moment a shipment leaves the gate of a nuclear licensee until it arrives at the facility of another nuclear licensee, not a single Federal agency has jurisdiction," charged Richard Pollock of Critical Mass, in a statement released by the nuclear watchdog group in November...

...Officials seem confident that this will be the permanent burial ground for nuclear waste...

...The report, by side-stepping the nuclear moratorium option, fails to address the whole range of options...

...Since then, most of the nation's burgeoning high-level atomic wastes from weapons programs have stayed in storage at Hanford...

...New Mexico Senator Pete Domenici is sponsoring legislation that would give states veto power over location of nuclear waste dumps within their borders...

...Around the country, communities with nuclear power plants in their midst are finding themselves stuck with annual accumulations of about thirty tons of atomic waste per reactor...

...Encouraged by the hospitable political climate surrounding Hanford, pro-nuclear interests are looking to the basalt lava beneath the Hanford Reservation for deep geological disposal of high-level nuclear wastes...

...Helen Caldicott, in the December 1978 issue) underscores the urgency of finding waste disposal solutions...

...In the late 1960s, a Federal test project for burying waste in salt rock was initiated at Lyons, Kansas...

...Governor Dixy Lee Ray and Senator Henry Jackson can be counted on as enthusiastic supporters...

...Department of Energy is drilling mile-deep test holes into basalt rock formations at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in eastern Washington...

...The Carter Administration says it opposes Domenici1 s bill "on constitutional grounds...

...The Executive branch now advocates more coordinated planning for waste storage and disposal...

...Heat from the waste could fracture rock formations and increase groundwater flow...

...WASHPIRG has expressed concern that the faults might act as water conduits for nuclear wastes...

...Meanwhile, extremely toxic nuclear garbage continues to pile up...

...About seventy-five million gallons of high-level wastes from atomic weapons production remain in temporary — and demonstrably leaky — storage, with at least forty million gallons more scheduled by the year 2000...

...Along with the shakiness of nuclear energy finances, absence of dependable storage for radioactive waste is key to the growing anti-nuclear sentiment of both the public and its elected officials...

...Like other Government reports, IRG incorporates present administrative standards on "acceptable" radiation doses — refusing to acknowledge the broad-based challenge to those standards from the General Accounting Office, Congressional investigations, the public, and significant elements of the scientific community...

...Hanford operators attributed the discrepancy to underestimates of the amount of plutonium dumped into the ground with the waste...

...Radioactive spills during transportation have become common occurrences...

...Seismic stability of the site is also questionable...

...In the last decade, frequent microearthquakes have been monitored at Hanford...

...with thirteen test holes drilled in the basalt by the end of 1978, attempts will be made this year to simulate waste storage in the rock...

...Started last summer under the sponsorship of the American Friends Service Committee and Clergy and Laity Concerned, the organization has been analyzing corporate agendas behind Hanford's role in the nuclear arms race and atomic energy...

...It was at Hanford that plutonium was produced for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945...

...Now a larger Waste Isolation Pilot Project in Carlsbad, New Mexico, is being tested as a prospective forerunner of major waste disposal...

...With the United States planning to take back waste from reactors it is selling overseas — mostly to repressive regimes, including those of South Korea, the Philippines, Argentina, and Brazil — the transportation hazards of nuclear waste become global...

...Last November, Montana voters approved what amounts to a ban on nuclear power in the state, after anti-nuclear forces were outfunded by more than 20-to-l during the campaign...

...Decommissioning is necessary for all nuclear power plants after the maximum forty years of operation — yet the extensive fiscal and technical dimensions of permanently decommissioning atomic reactors are still to be comprehended...

...In Illinois, the Morris storage facility — the only off-site location in the United States to accept reactor spent fuel — has encountered persistent technical difficulties...

...Department of Energy unless it stopped site engineering studies until an environmental impact statement is completed...

...There are strong indications, however, that the nuclear establishment has Federal administrative programs under way to neutralize local opposition...

...An HCP position paper declares, "Implicit in these goals is our commitment to moving this nation toward nuclear disarmament and the abolition of nuclear power, while redirecting the resources now bound up in the nuclear industry toward meeting pressing social needs and developing safe energy alternatives...

...At sea, enormous mutant sponges have grown around leaking waste barrels in San Francisco Bay...

...passage into law would probably turn Hanford into the country's central disposal site for commercial and military waste...

...Critical A/f Journal noted that construction of interim spent fuel storage facilities "could be an attractive option for the Administration, allowing it to claim a 'solution' to the waste problem and ending the mounting crises at reactor sites where spent fuel rods are filling up the storage pool's...

...Department of Transportation has begun hearings on Federal regulations...

...But this is of limited value so long as the debilitating assumptions remain...

...The GAO report added, "The threat of irreversible radiation damage to our 'There are many geologists who think the (Government) is moving too last...' natural resources continues to grow larger...

...To Gofman, whose discoveries of the fissionability of Uranium-233 made possible its use in nuclear power reactors, the greatest danger from nuclear waste lies in its risk of escapement during transportation...

...N.S...

...Unsolved problems compound the costs, and the profits...

...Two Washington counties with nuclear power questions on the ballot voted against nuclear plants by overwhelming margins...

...Indicative was the reaction from the Boston-based Energy Policy Information Center, which pointed out that "there are plenty of reports around which dispute the conclusions of the IRG...

...A new analysis from the U.S...

...Recognizing that nuclear power is not financially viable without massive subsidies, the Wisconsin Public Service Commission has imposed a moratorium on new nuclear plant construction...

...Documentation of genetic damage and cancer resulting from radiation exposures previously considered insignificant (see "Radiation: Unsafe at Any Level," by Dr...

...In recent months, the Federal Government has been churning out reports on the prognosis for nuclear waste disposal...

...If constructed, these interim repositories would greatly increase travel distance for nuclear waste...

...The world in which we found ourselves at the end of World War II," wrote James Baldwin recently, "and, more particularly, the brutal and gratuitous folly with which we ushered in the atomic age, brought into focus, as never before, the real meaning of the American social contract and exposed the self-serving nature of the American dream...

...economist Irvin C.Bupp put it in their new book, Light Water: How the Nuclear Dream Dissolved, "Rarely did those who seized on nuclear power as a means to their own ends know its actual economic and technical status...

...About half a million gallons of high-level wastes have leaked into the ground at Hanford — including 115,000 gallons of caustic boiling waste from a storage tank during fifty days in 1973...

...It must be assumed that before all the waste constituents have decayed, they would have breached the containers, groundwater would fill the vault, and waste would be introduced into the water surrounding the repository...

...McCormack has introduced a bill to designate Hanford a national repository for atomic wastes...

...With about half of the nation's operable plants already expanding on-site waste storage capacity, commercial atomic reactors are wearing out their welcome...

...State Attorney General Toney Anaya threatened to bring suit against the U.S...

...Designed for temporary use in many cases, waste storage facilities have been left to the vicissitudes of corrosion, leaks, and ruptures at dump sites and reactor storage pools throughout the country...

...Chaired by Energy Secretary Schlesinger — former head of the Defense Department, Central Intelligence Agency, and Atomic Energy Commission — the IRG issued "tentative findings" within the Presiden-tially-mandated seven months...

...Nuclear waste processing facilities at West Valley, New York, have closed amid official speculation that the storage tanks could fail at any time...

...The Hanford basalt drilling project comes at a time when the nuclear industry and the Federal Government badly need visible evidence of light at the end of the nuclear waste tunnel...

...Ultimately the organization intends to bring about non-nuclear sources of employment for the more than 10,000 workers at Hanford...

...Such concerns are accentuated by recent Government enthusiasm for away-from-reactor "interim" storage facilities like those recommended by IRG...

...Energy Department policy documents call for "cooperative Federalism" or "consultation and concurrence" aimed at facilitating state compliance, with a minimum of conflict or naked Federal preemption of individual state powers...

...The scheme would boost industry hopes for turning the Pacific Northwest into an "energy farm" for other regions...

...But salt "decrepitation" makes the storage vulnerable to water drawn out of salt crystals by waste canister heat...

...General Accounting Office issued a 1977 study concluding "technology is not sufficiently advanced that permanent disposal is possible...

...Although the report claims to be neutral on the question of future increased reliance on nuclear power, it is not," said the Union of Concerned Scientists, which blasted IRG for failure to recognize that a halt "to building more radioactive waste-producing nuclear power plants is the simplest way to prevent the radioactive waste problem from becoming a more severe health and safety problem...

...in both cases utilities out-spent their foes by vast ratios...

...Senator Jackson's version of a Northwest regional energy bill seeks massive Federal financial backup for new commercial reactors not otherwise feasible because of the dire economic straits of the nuclear power industry...

...Immersed in a nuclear technology it was proud to have developed — and unreceptive to the notion that all problems are not necessarily soluble by technological exertions — the Government-corporate alliance has refused to admit the insufficiency of present knowledge regarding radioactivity and nuclear waste containment...

...Last spring, President Carter appointed an Interagency Review Group (IRG) and ordered it to come up with "recommendations for establishment of an Administration policy with respect to long-term management of nuclear wastes and supporting programs to implement this policy...

...But the basic geological and geochemical work necessary to draw firm conclusions about what happens to the waste after that simply hasn't been done yet...

...Clearly, resistance to the Federal Government's preemptive powers could play havoc with the Administration's plans for rapid nuclear expansion...

...Optimistic predictions, routinely issued for decades, are clearly wearing thin — threatening the commercial nuclear power industry and jeopardizing atomic weapons production as well...

...For many years the Columbia River was the most radioactive waterway in the world, primarily because of the military's plutonium-producing reactors at Hanford...

...The safest way to guard against proliferation would be to refuse to export the reactors in the first place, but such a policy would not be as lucrative for corporations eager to do nuclear business abroad with subsidies from such agencies as the Export-Import Bank...

...HCP is growing rapidly in many parts of the Northwest — often drawing on experience of activists involved in campaigns against the first-strike Trident nuclear weapons submarine base on Puget Sound, the Satsop reactor construction site in western Washington, and the three-year-old Trojan nuclear power plant near Portland...

...John Gofman, former associate director of the Lawrence Livermore Radiation Laboratory, believes that "currently the nuclear industry and the governmental regulatory agencies haven't the foggiest notion of how well they are doing at containment...

...But technological dead-ends and local opposition to particular waste repository projects have thwarted governmental attempts to maintain the appearance of having the situation under control...

...The national search for a nuclear waste repository is likely to settle on the 570-square-mile Hanford Nuclear Reservation...

...Groundwork is being completed for a major new public relations push by the Government-corporate partnership promoting continued nuclear development...

...Congressman Mike McCormack, representing that district, has championed the nuclear industry in Congress, making use of his position as chairman of the House Subcommittee on Advanced Energy Technologies...

...Latest Federal documents target initial operation of a high-level waste disposal facility some time between 1988 and 1995 — at least three years beyond the deadline announced by Carter in 1977...

...We know how to construct mined cavities, and we can probably implant the canisters all right...

...The testing was abandoned after discovery of geological flaws at the site and vociferous local opposition...

...Migration via groundwater is the most likely process for reintroduction of nuclear waste into the biosphere," noted the recent study by the Washington Public Interest Research Group (WASHPIRG...

...A report issued in late 1978 by the Washington Public Interest Research Group found that in the quest for national waste disposal, "Hanford could be chosen out of political necessity, and not because it is the best available site...

...The damn thing may be impossible...

...The Hanford Reservation's track record on containing nuclear waste hardly inspires confidence...

...After all but one of the nine reactors were shut down, the river's radioactivity levels diminished considerably...

...New Hampshire Governor Meldrim Thomson lost his bid for reelection after a campaign in which his uncompromising support for the beleaguered Seabrook nuclear plant became a major issue...

...Taken as a whole, the IRG report provides verification of the adage that to choose one's advisers is to choose one's advice...

...The history of U.S...

...It isn't easy to find locations...

...Further information is available from Hanford Conversion Project, 4312 SE Stark, Portland, Oregon 97215...

...In this way, most of the nuclear fuel cycle could be situated along the Columbia River inside Han-ford's militarized perimeters...

...There are many geologists who think the IRG is moving too fast, with too little real scientific knowledge...

...There is a strong temptation to view nuclear predicaments as unfortunate consequences of atomic fission...

...The rapidly multiplying quantities of nuclear plant waste would be handled by continuing to expand on-site storage, while building away-from-reactor storage pools...

...Nervous private owners unloaded responsibility and financial burdens for 600,000 gallons of high-level military waste on the state government...

...Only then will we be able to transform the American dream into a future that nurtures life instead of destroying it...

...The result, a circular flow of self-congratulatory claims preserved the discrepancy between promise and performance...

...Nuclear Regulatory Commission...

...A widely respected expert on nuclear waste, Lash believes "there is no guarantee that the Federal Government can or will ever develop an adequately safe, permanent waste disposal facility...

...We have oodles of basalt all over the world, but here it's closer to the surface, and of firmer consistency," says Raul Deju, a supervisor of the Hanford basalt drilling project for Rockwell International...

...The U.S...

...Yet a close look at the ominous specters of nuclear development uncovers roots deep in our economic system, social relations, and internalized suppositions...

...They are reluctant to pay the Government to take spent fuel off their hands...

...Reflecting on current difficulties with the Carlsbad waste disposal pilot project, a DOE official commented, "It's not easy to move it out of New Mexico...

...For a number of years, salt has been touted as the remedy for nuclear waste disposal ills...

...Meanwhile, the coalition is formally intervening against licensing of a nuclear power plant at Hanford, currently under consideration by the U.S...

...Sixty-seven U.S...

...Congress "has invested tens of billions of dollars and almost thirty years in the commercial development of nuclear energy — often at the expense of other energy options — yet cannot obtain answers to the most elementary questions concerning the 'back end' of the nuclear generating cycle," commented Representative Robert F. Drinan of Massachusetts...

...Acts of commission have been equally unsettling...

...Specific Federal test drilling projects for waste disposal have been blocked by state actions in Ohio, Michigan, Texas, and New York, where a 1978 statewide Harris Poll found citizens opposed to waste storage anywhere in New York by a margin greater than 4 to 1. In the last few years, about a dozen states have taken formal stands against allowing nuclear waste dumps inside their borders...

...The custodial pricetag: $540 million...

...Now the Government wants to increase plutonium production at Hanford for a new generation of nuclear weapons designed for first-strike capabilities, such as the Trident submarine system and the cruise missile...

...Carter and his top aides seem determined to stonewall the groundswell of opposition...' IRG's conclusions dovetail snugly with the latest Federal reports on what to do with reactor spent fuel...

...Despite previous promises that spent fuel would be transported elsewhere within a matter of months, a licensed nuclear reactor site has come to mean de facto licensing of indefinite storage for hundreds of tons of dangerous waste...

...The test program in New Mexico has also raised political hackles...

...Government paid Rockwell approximately $30 million for conducting basalt studies at Hanford...

...The IRG report amounts to a compendium of pro-nuclear viewpoints within the Executive branch...

...Government computations also discount the probable magnitude of radiation releases...

...at the Farallon Islands off the California coast, an Environmental Protection Agency study found that about one-quarter of 50,000 waste containers ruptured during the twenty years they had been lodged in the Pacific Ocean...

...Military wastes, previously altered with chemicals to retard corrosion, are now resistant to solidification processes necessary for long-term storage...

...It is ideal for the nuclear industry's purposes: located in a remote geographical area, shrouded in a military cloak since the dawn of the atomic age, unequivocally supported by the state's most powerful politicians...

...Council on Environmental Quality a year ago...

...Instead, the information available to them was part of a catechism whose basic function was to answer infidels and sustain the faith, of the converted...

...Opposing expansion of Morris storage capacity, Illinois Attorney General William J. Scott threatened to "try anything I can do, including lying down in front of some of those trucks to stop it...

...The revitalized theme: technological war is winnable...

...In the past year, the U.S...

...The promised ultimate solution — permanent disposal — has yet to appear on the horizon in any remotely reliable form...

...Spending for nuclear energy is augmented by many hidden costs, including Federally funded research and subsidized uranium enrichment...

...When the Federal Government admitted in 1977 that it could not account for about four tons of plutonium — enough for several hundred atomic bombs — more than a ton of it was believed to be missing from Hanford's inventories...

...Geological Survey cited salt's instability, and a recent article in Science magazine about salt disposal concludes that "there seems to be an emerging consensus among earth scientists that the old sense of certitude was misplaced...

...Effectively to resist the deadly eventualities of the nuclear industry will require a broad-based challenge to prerogatives of corporate domination...

...In recent months, several states have effectively prevented further reactor construction...

...In New York, Governor Hugh Carey is pressing for an end to nuclear power expansion — a course recommended by the U.S...

...The Government estimates that existing nuclear weapons wastes at Hanford will take a minimum of fourteen years to solidify — at a cost of $10 billion, according to a National Academy of Sciences study...

...The energy research center describes IRG as the nuclear industry's "attempt to counterattack...

...I'm afraid the engineering is getting ahead of the geological understanding," says John Steinhart, a geophysicist and energy specialist at the University of Wisconsin...

...agement later, no solutions have emerged...

...they may prefer to gamble on profiting from the spent fuel later by retaining possession now...

...Artificial shafts could provide escape routes for waste, or entryways for water...

...Test drilling has reached more than 5,000 feet below the earth's surface at Hanford...

...several faults are known to cross the Hanford Reservation and the steep hills alongside the Columbia...

...Yet Representative Morris Udall, who chairs the House Interior Committee, appears to have been right when he recently remarked that nuclear waste disposal "is unlike other public-policy problems...

...On the Federal level, while Congressional committees have begun to ask some hard questions, Carter and his top aides seem determined to stonewall the groundswell of opposition to the government's nuclear recklessness...

...As such it has drawn critical and often outraged responses from environmental and scientific organizations all over the country...

...Prodded by such criticisms — and by nuclear transportation bans adopted in a number of counties and municipalities, including New York City — the U.S...

...While costly to ratepayers and taxpayers, the atomic fuel cycle provides high profits for multinational corporations...

...In 1976, Missouri residents voted to take plant construction work in progress out of the ratebase for electricity customers, and two years later Oregon voters did the same in the face of widespread utility advertisements opposing "the anti-nuclear measure in disguise...

...Concern is intensifying as more citizens become aware that nuclear waste will remain deadly for a minimum of 250,000 years...

...nuclear policy "reveals a consistent theme of ill-advised and irresponsible decisions by the Federal Government," says Terry Lash of the Natural Resources Defense Council...

...Significantly, utilities with nuclear investments are not especially enthusiastic about parting with spent fuel...