Hanford Watch, Portland, Oregon

Those of us who went on Saturday's tour of Hanford talked about sharing some of our reactions. Here are some of my initial responses.

To say the tour was "incredible," or that Hanford is an "incredible" place, is to get back to the original meaning of that word. It's hard to believe that such a place exists. Early in the tour we drove for miles and miles through great expanses of open desert, and all around us, left and right, were reactors. Any one of those facilities is an extraordinary technological and social artifact; here there were too many to count.

We watched the demolition of the stacks at the D reactor complex -- a symbol of changes that are taking place at Hanford. But we Hanford-watchers seemed to have a different attitude than the other (150 or so?) folks who were there. They were having a kind of tailgate party, hanging out after the blast to have a cold drink (non-alcoholic, of course), laugh, and shoot the bull. But us, we hightailed it to the bus, just ahead of the expanding dust cloud from the stacks. Two cultures.

If you ask me what was the single most powerful moment of the tour, it was when we walked on the steel-grid floor above the West K-basin, looking down on numberless canisters of spent nuclear fuel. I'd seen pictures of the canisters, and they do look like the pictures, but the pictures did not prepare me for HOW MANY canisters there are. They went on and on, they seemed to cover the better part of the area of a football field. Here was a case where, I think, you have to see the thing to comprehend it. Numbers don't describe it. Photos place an artificial frame around a small part of something very, very big. Bigger than the human beings that made it, I fear.

And these were the intact canisters, not the rotting, rotten, and decrepit ones of the East K-basin. Tons of stuff, just about the nastiest stuff one could imagine. They're going to work on the West basin first, to try to develop some experience and expertise, before they tackle the East basin. Of course, the more time passes, the more decrepit those canisters get. It's a race against the law of entropy. Entropy has a big head start, and we're still at the point of choosing what kind of sneakers to wear. God be with them, those brave souls who plan to go in there and clean that mess up. As we entered the Office of River Protection office building for lunch, we noticed -- of all things -- ANGELS etched in the glass above the entrance doors. To me, they seemed so out of place. What are angels doing at Hanford, of all places? But now I think I understand. Angels are needed there, if they're needed anywhere.

So, what's the overall message I received? Hanford is BIG. The problems there are BIG. BIG, heroic efforts will be needed to undo the damage that's been done, to save ourselves from the mess we've made. Big efforts imply a lot of work and commitment from the people involved. But also, the number of people involved must be big. Politicians must cooperate, managers must cooperate, engineers must cooperate, technicians must cooperate, ordinary people must cooperate. Hanford is not a local problem, it's a catastrophe of national proportions (just as we designate some places national parks or national monuments, we should designate Hanford a "national catastrophe"). It needs national-level attention, and plenty of it. It took a nation to make the mess at Hanford, and it will take a nation to unmake it.

There isn't a lot of time left for squabbling, arguing, capitalizing on these problems, hiding our heads in the sand (the sand will soon be radioactive), or otherwise postponing the work. People need to know that, and people need to respond.