[CPEO-MEF] RADIATION: Energy Department management, with a focus on Hanford (WA)

[Lenny Siegel <lennysiegel@gmail.com>]

Wasteland

By Katherine McIntire Peters
Government Executive
December 1, 2010

Decades of poor management at the Energy Department threatens public 
health and national security.

Last summer, a former Energy Department executive conducted an 
independent analysis of plutonium waste at five former U.S. nuclear 
weapons production facilities and reached a startling conclusion: During 
the past 45 years, about 12.7 metric tons of plutonium were discarded at 
the sites, more than three times the department's last official 
estimate, which was in 1996. The findings suggest Energy faces a far 
bigger job in cleaning up the radioactive waste generated through 
decades of nuclear weapons production than previously believed.

The dramatic increase, wrote Robert Alvarez, senior scholar at the 
Institute for Policy Studies, which published the findings in July, is 
likely due to three factors: the reclassification of some production 
residue as waste, previous underestimates of material lost through the 
production process, and improvements in the way data is characterized.

Nobody really knows how much plutonium the United States produced and 
buried in the wake of World War II because of significant record-keeping 
gaps during the first 25 years of weapons production, says Alvarez, who 
was deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment 
during the Clinton administration. The implications of his analysis are 
most profound at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in southeastern 
Washington state, where government engineers and scientists built the 
first industrial-size nuclear reactor and a plant to extract plutonium 
from the resulting fuel rods, an effort that produced the Fat Man bomb 
detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, in August 1945. During a 40-year period, 
nine reactors at the 586-square-mile reservation on the Columbia River 
produced nearly one-third of the nation's plutonium - more than any 
other site. Today, Hanford is the largest nuclear waste dump in the 
Western Hemisphere and poses a long-term environmental threat to the region.

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.govexec.com/features/1210-01/1210-01s1.htm

--


Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org



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