HANFORD, Wash. – The movie Oppenheimer puts a spotlight on the events that led up to the creation of the A-bomb and some of what happened after. The plutonium used in the fat man bomb shown in the movie was produced at the Hanford site.
It took under a year to build the original B-reactor on the Hanford Site. It may take over 100 years to clean-up the waste created through the production of 67 tons of plutonium produced at the site over the course of it’s 40 year life span.
“The mission at the time was plutonium production and now the mission is clean up,” Washington Department of Ecology’s Nuclear Waste Management Program said.
Miller said the production of plutonium creates a lot of waste.
The Department of Energy, which does the physical cleanup at the Hanford site, has done a lot according to miller, but he said it still has a long way to go when it comes to the waste that remains.
“We have all of this aging infrastructure, and the longer cleanup goes on the greater the chance that there is of another infrastructure collapse or a major release of contamination out on the site,” Miller said.
56 million gallons of chemically hazardous waste created on the site is just one of several forms of waste DOE has to clean up.
Below the ground, a 65 or so-mile plume of contaminated groundwater remains from the 80 miles initially found when cleanup began. Miller compares the plume of waste to an underground waterborne plume similar to a cloud of smoke.
He said contaminated equipment buried in trenches throughout the site is another form of waste to clean up.
Clean-up is not only helping the native plants and animals but potentially protecting people that live along the Columbia River from that contamination according to Miller.
“It’s just vital that we protect the river and the environment and the people of Washington. And I think that’s a mission that all three agencies are behind is getting cleanup done,” he said.
DOE has made progress through the last 34 years of cleanup including the cocooning of 7 of the 9 reactors on the site. Plans are now in the works to start vitrifying or “glassifying” the waste into a less hazardous form according to Miller.
The Hanford site still has at least 50 years of work to go to make the area safe and to return it to what it was before. That would make the cleanup wrap up around 2070 almost 100 years after plutonium production finished on the site in the 70s.
“It takes a lot of work to do that because this is one of the most if not the most complex environmental cleanups, nuclear cleanups in the world, and that complicates things and makes it harder to work because so much of the work on the Hanford site is the first of its kind in The world being done,” Miller said.
He also said that funding for cleanup at the site is key to keeping that 50-year timeline.
When the site gets less funding the number of years it takes to clean up the site likely will go which he says will raise the overall cost over time.
