I (almost always) like to see mentions of my hometown in the national media and today was no exception. Today, Richland Washington was the setting for an AP/CNN report on a decommissioned nuclear reactor making it's final journey for burial.
Those unfamiliar with Richland, and I think that includes just about everybody, may not know why it exists. Once a farming town, little more than a wide spot in the road, it was transformed overnight into a super-secret research and development center for the U.S. Government. During the early 1940's, the village became a city as government workers erected row upon row of prefabricated housing and supporting infrastructure. I grew up in one of those "pre-fabs". They held up incredibly well in the dry, desert heat. Having been built much better than they had to be just to house Hanford workers during the war.
But what is Hanford? Hanford is the Department of Energy's (D.O.E.) nuclear research facility. Almost everything nuclear has some Hanford component or engineering in it. Hanford helped build the bombs that ended WWII and that was just the beginning. Up until the 1970's, Hanford was growing and providing very well-paying jobs for the local community. What's more, many of the jobs were very technical and the men and women who filled those jobs were very educated and intelligent people. They expected their children to receive first-class educations as well, so the Richland public schools were second to none. It was a company town and the company (D.O.E and the war-machine) were doing very well, thank-you.
And then it happened. A cataclysm for Richland. The worst thing that can happen to a town that thrives on war (or at least the threat of it). Peace broke out! Curses, anything but peace! Presidents started negotiating treaties with the Soviets (and later the Russians) to actually REDUCE the number of nuclear weapons in the global arsenals. This really was sad for the folks in and around Hanford, but of course it's FABULOUS news for every other living creature on the face of the planet.
And so Hanford struggled to reinvent itself. The local "Chambers of Commerce" tried to trumpet the other "great" things they had to offer. There was a minor-league hockey team (an oddity in the desert where summer temps routinely reach 110!) and one week each summer, there were hydroplane races on the Columbia river (downstream from the reactors and, we now discover, subject to occasional, unannounced discharges of radioactive wastes). But seriously, there were still some highly trained people and good infrastructure. Plus, we had some nice reactors pumping out dirt cheap electricity and there was still all that open land in Hanford.
You may find this hard to believe, but when the government was trying to find a site to store the deadliest nuclear wastes, something most cities were terrified of even having shipped close to them, Richland was fighting for the right to receive the waste! No, really. Please build a dump for the most toxic and terrifying substances every dreamed of by man. Build it here, in our back yards, on the banks of one of the largest river systems in all the world. And build it SOON, we need the jobs!
Not all waste goes to Hanford. But a number of old reactor vessels do. And today another one did. I'm not opposed to this. They have to go somewhere. And the good people at Hanford, people I might have grown-up with or even gone to school with, will take every conceivable precaution. They fill the reactors with cement and encase them in shielding. And entomb the whole thing in special, hopefully, leak-proof graves. As a child, I thought it was funny that they developed a special cartoon to mark the graves (although I've never wanted or been allowed to visit one). The cartoon was necessary because the horrors being buried at Hanford will still be wicked-deadly after thousands and thousands of years. This isn't some landfill that could host luxury homes in a few decades. The cartoon was meant for post-apocalipic people who might wander in and wonder what was buried there. It showed a picture of people standing on the ground with drums buried beneath them. Then, the people excavated the drums. Then the people turned to skeletons. I sometimes wondered if that would really stop anyone. Might they dig the drums up hoping to use it against the cave men in the next valley? What if they wanted to use the stuff to "tip their arrows?"
Anyway, I digress even further than usual. The paradoxically beautiful purple reactor was removed from it's barge and transferred to a special trailer for the final funeral procession to its grave. Along with lots of Navy reactors that are smaller and aren't allowed as much publicity, it will be buried. The people of Portland (downstream) breath a sigh of relieve as the reactor goes past them. It's akin to having an upstairs neighbor who builds bombs for a living. "Hey, don't worry. This stuff is completely safe. Trust me."
But, unlike a neighbor where you could demand to see how they work and expect to be notified instantly if there ever were a problem. Hanford thrives under a veil of absolute secrecy. Protected from liability for their mistakes by the D.O.E. Residents only find out about leaks, and radioactive discharges years and even decades after the fact. "Hmm, your kid has cancer? What a coincidence. At the same time your child was wading in the Columbia we were flushing highly toxic radioactive isotopes into the same river, UPSTREAM from your toddler. But I'm sure the cancer is unrelated. It's not our fault, it must have been God."
And so, with the danger past, the good people of Portland can relax and get ready to go back to work tomorrow. Maybe they can cool-off and enjoy some swimming or windsurfing on the Columbia?
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