Buried in President Bush’s proposed budget for next year is a story of broken promises. Bush wants to increase spending on every major category of the government’s nuclear programme except one: cleaning up the toxic legacy that lurks at nuclear reservations and facilities around the nation. The administration wants more funding for nuclear weaponry, nuclear energy, nuclear science and management. But it would spend $800 million less on environmental cleanups at 20 nuclear sites in 14 states. Its request for cleanups at nuclear sites in several states is the lowest since 1997.Federal cleanups are not yet completed in Washington state, New York, South Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Illinois, Kentucky, California, Idaho, New Mexico, Texas, Arkansas, Nevada or Utah. The government is turning its back on long-standing commitments.Nothing better illustrates why America must clean up the enormous quantities of waste at these sites than Hanford, the country’s most-contaminated federal nuclear reservation in south-central Washington. Here, the United States produced weapons-grade plutonium, unlocking the code to the power that helped win the Cold War. (Plutonium manufactured at the site was used in the first nuclear bomb, tested at the Trinity site, and in Fat Man, the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.) The legacy of that era is a witches’ brew of the world’s most dangerous materials, housed in half-century-old storage tanks, that are contaminating nearby soils and aquifers.Will America keep its promises and clean up this toxic legacy? Will the nation and Congress allow the administration to turn its back on millions of Americans? Success won’t come easily. Conscientious Americans must join the states that are living with unfinished nuclear cleanups to compel the Energy Department to get its programme moving again. Just below ground at the Hanford site are 177 enormous steel tanks. They contain 53 million gallons of heavy metals, acids, solvents and highly radioactive elements, including plutonium, cesium, strontium and uranium. Sixty-seven tanks are confirmed leakers, and nearly all are well beyond their design lifespan.According to the US Government Accountability Office, the federal government and its contractors also buried thousands of tonnes of radioactive and hazardous waste in unlined landfills and injected 450 billion gallons of liquid waste into ponds, ditches and drainfields at the site. That is about the amount of water that flows through the Potomac River in a month. As you read this, a huge plume of groundwater contaminated with radiation and heavy metals is moving from Hanford toward the Columbia River.Adequate cleanup funding is imperative. And it doesn’t require a budget increase; President Bush only has to get his nuclear priorities right. Each passing day increases the risk of leakage and catastrophic tank failure at Hanford. Each delay increases the risk to workers, the environment and more than a million people who live and work near the Columbia River downstream from Hanford.If Bush’s proposed budget budget stands, only one tank at Hanford will be emptied in 2009. At that rate, it will take 140 years to empty the remaining 142 single-shell tanks and process the waste. The people of America don’t have 140 years. The river doesn’t have 140 years. (Chris Gregoire, a Democrat, is governor of Washington. Maria Cantwell, also a Democrat, represents the state in the Senate, where she serves on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.)Dealing with wasteNo country has learnt how to get rid of nuclear waste—and this is the biggest challenge that the industry faces. • France, which gets 80 per cent of its electricity from nuclear power, stores high-level reprocessed waste at its La Hague plant. Here, 40 years’ worth of highly radioactive waste is stored under three floor surfaces, each about the size of a basketball court, where it awaits final geologic disposal. The French are still looking for sites where the waste can be disposed of. In the late 80s, the waste issue almost threatened to halt the programme when people in rural France protested. They didn’t want a nuclear dustbin under their feet. France then decided to build 3-4 research laboratories to study various options for stocking waste. • India gets 3 per cent of its power from nuclear energy and hopes the deal with the US will help it generate about 25-30 per cent nuclear energy in some time. But India’s search for a permanent waste disposal site that has been on since early 1980s has been marred by controversy and protests. Like in France, nobody wants to live on a nuclear graveyard.• China gets barely 2 per cent of its electricity from nuclear energy, so tackling waste isn’t a problem yet. But over the next 15 years, if China goes ahead with its plans to build 30 new reactors, it will have to worry about disposing over 1,000 tonnes a year of waste. There are plans to expand a small facility in western Gansu province to deal with the spent fuel. Environmentalists say poorer areas—and Tibet—may be forced to host China’s nuclear waste.
