Nuclear Cleanup Site Has Cities Cleaning Up Financially
Effort That Began In 1989 Has Been An Economic Boon

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 1, 2006

RICHLAND, Wash. -- Out on the Hanford nuclear reservation, a fantastically poisoned plateau where the federal government brewed up most of the plutonium for its nuclear arsenal, the cleanup is going rather badly.

Now in its 17th year, the nation's largest and most complex environmental remediation project is costing many billions of dollars more than expected and will continue far longer than experts once predicted.

That dismal forecast is music to the ears of local residents.

"The silver lining is all local, where there are no consequences for failure and no misdeed goes unrewarded," said Robert Alvarez, a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington and a former Energy Department official who monitored the cleanup during the Clinton era.

By almost every measure, except the radiation and chemical illnesses suffered by some Hanford workers, five decades of making bombs were a blessing to Pasco, Kennewick and Richland -- neighboring towns along the Columbia River that call themselves the Tri-Cities.

The area was transformed from a poor, mostly empty rural backwater to a highly educated, solidly middle-class center for nuclear technology, albeit one that bordered North America's most dangerous radioactive dump.

When plutonium production halted in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was widespread local fear that the Tri-Cities would themselves fall into penury. But cleaning up Hanford's colossal nuclear mess is proving more lucrative -- for the locals -- than making it in the first place.

What's more, said Michele S. Gerber, a Cold War historian who has written a critical history of Hanford and now works for one of the private contractors cleaning up the 586-square-mile site, the effort is a more stable engine for job creation, housing construction and business investment than making plutonium, which tended to wax and wane with foreign security threats and international nuclear treaties.

"I think the cleanup will last a hundred years," she says.

With taxpayers footing the bill, the failure to make progress in sanitizing the Hanford site means that more and more federal spending will be showered on the sagebrush semi-desert in eastern Washington, and that residents can look forward to more decades of growth, prosperity, rising real estate values and better restaurants.

At Hanford, the bungled big-ticket project of the moment is a gargantuan factory that would, if it ever works, transform high-level waste into glass logs suitable for long-term storage elsewhere. The plant has already cost $3.4 billion but has yet to process a single gallon of the 53 million gallons of deadly high-level waste stored in 177 underground tanks.

Construction stalled this year when the Energy Department discovered that factory designers had underestimated the risk of earthquakes. Now, department officials say the earliest the plant can start up is 2019, by which time it will have cost $12.2 billion, more than double the estimate of three years ago.

Cleanup of Hanford also has the virtue of being a public, environmentally friendly process, unlike the sloppy, secret and paranoid decades of the Cold War. Then, 440 billion gallons of contaminated liquid were intentionally dumped into the soil here, health scientists collected urine samples from front porches of Richland technicians and FBI agents asked neighbor to snitch on neighbor.

In the Cold War era, the culture of the Tri-Cities played down health risks at Hanford -- and records show that federal officials sometimes lied about the risks to people who lived downwind.

In the cleanup era, though, the culture embraces candor.

During a recent public bus tour of the Hanford site, Gerber stood at the front of the bus and spoke in chilling detail about "the long waiting game" that lies ahead before deadly contamination can be cleaned up. She said that if there were a teacup of Hanford's high-level waste on the bus, it would kill or grievously sicken everyone on board within an hour.

Candor, in the cleanup context, is good politics. The more dangerous the site's waste is perceived to be, the more likely the federal government is to continue pumping in money to take care of it.

That spending, Gerber said, has hovered around $2 billion a year for the past 11 years and is likely to continue, with some slow decline, for well more than a decade. Even then, lots of federal money will continue to flow. The cleanup of high-level tank waste, assuming that the new processing plant starts operating by 2019, will then take at least 20 to 25 more years, said Roy Schepens, manager of the Energy Department's Office of River Protection in Richland.

That guarantee has helped secure increased outside investment in local agribusiness, particularly the wine industry and wine tourism. That, in turn, has attracted high-end restaurants such as Anthony's, a seafood restaurant group based in the Seattle area.

"Hanford supplies us with customers in the middle of the week who are doing isotope training and on weekends we have wine tourists," said Lane Hoss, a vice president at Anthony's.

To comprehend the growth and good times that have come with the federal cleanup spending, it is useful to look at Pasco, traditionally the poorest and smallest of the Tri-Cities.

Since 1990, Pasco's population has increased 134 percent, jumping from about 20,000 to nearly 48,000. Pasco High School, now the largest in the state, is bursting at the seams and a second high school is under construction.

"Hanford provides a strong, steady base for the future," said Carl F. Adrian, president of the Tri-City Development Council, which markets the area. "We are looking at growth well into 2040."

Richard J. Smith, Pasco's director of community and economic development, moved to town in 1992 and discovered that he was riding herd on the fastest-growing community in Washington state and one of the fastest-growing in the West.

"It just exploded," he said, noting that 20 years' worth of expected growth occurred in less than 10 years. "There were big potato fields west of town where there was nothing but a water tower. Right now, those fields are totally covered with houses and stores."

In Washington, D.C., news about construction delays and cost increases at Hanford's high-level waste-processing plant has often caused rage and consternation.

"You want to take somebody out and hang them," Rep. David L. Hobson (R-Ohio), chairman of the House subcommittee that pays for the project, told the Los Angeles Times.

But in Pasco, the news has generated a quiet measure of joy.

"We didn't view it as a negative," Smith said, referring to the delays and cost overruns at the waste-processing plant. "If you are an urban planner, this is where the action is."

He said he wishes the Hanford cleanup "would go on forever."