HANFORD WATCH NEWSLETTER
May 16, 1999

CLEANUP COMPACT MARKING 10 YEARS
Tri-City Herald – May 10, 1999
The May 15, 1989 ceremony marked the signing of the Tri-Party Agreement. The TPA, as it's known in Hanford jargon, is a pact among the Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington state Department of Ecology. Its frequently modified pages set the deadlines and standards for cleaning up the most contaminated chunk of land in the Western Hemisphere.

The pact's 30-year timetable calling for completing the cleanup by 2018 already has slipped 10 years to 2028. For example, the pact called for beginning to convert the radioactive wastes in Hanford's underground tanks into glass by 1999 -- a deadline that years ago became clearly impossible to meet. New glassification start-up deadlines were negotiated -- first to 2002 and now 2007.

Longtime environmental activist Gerald Pollet, director of Heart of America Northwest, said: "The biggest drawback to the (agreement) in 1989 was that it was not easily enforceable. And DOE would not fulfill its funding requirements and would break milestones."

But the mid-1990s found Congress in a major budget-slashing mood. At the same time, Hanford received heavy criticism for spending millions of dollars on studies and administrative work with little cleanup taking place.
So, Hanford's budgets and employment dropped tremendously.
[The rest of this is worth reading as a Hanford history lesson.]
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/1999/0510.html#anchor596187

TRI-PARTY AGREEMENT AT 10; EARLY SUCCESS MUST CONTINUE
Tri-City Herald editorial – May 13, 1999
Entombed reactors and cleaned up sites, a huge trench accepting radioactive waste, contents of some single-shell waste tanks pumped to double-shelled tanks, clean water returning to the Columbia River - a lot more has been accomplished at Hanford than its critics give it credit for. Let's hear it for the Tri-Party Agreement.
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/OPINION/0513.html#anchor596414

HANFORD WORKERS DIAGNOSED WITH BERYLLIUM LUNG DISEASE
Environmental News Service -- May 10, 1999
Employees at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Hanford Nuclear Facility have established a new proactive group to deal with potential worker health risks from exposure to beryllium at the former plutonium production site in southeastern Washington state. The Beryllium Employee Awareness Group is exploring risks from contact with beryllium dust which can cause a serious and incurable lung disease known as chronic beryllium disease.
http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste/news/ens27.htm

DUKE'S HANFORD ROLE LIKELY TO BE REDUCED
Tri-City Herald – May 13, 1999
DE&S Hanford is expected to shrink to a significantly smaller presence at the often troubled K Basins project. That move would change DE&S Hanford -- commonly called Duke -- from a major Hanford subcontractor to a small company that provides technical expertise to Fluor Daniel Hanford on moving spent nuclear fuel. The change is not expected to slow work to remove 2,300 tons of spent nuclear fuel from two indoor pools close to the Columbia River. [This project is one of Hanford's highest priorities because of the danger to the Columbia River.]

The plan is to process the fuel into a safer form and store it in a huge underground vault in central Hanford. The timetable calls for starting to move the fuel by November 2000, finish the move by December 2003, and have the radioactive sludge removed by July 2005, for a total cost of $1.59 billion

The project has been plagued with inherited bad figures and later problems with costs, coordination, quality control, planning and management. Every involved company and agency shared the blame. DOE's Washington, D.C., headquarters plans to send a team to look at the project's cost and schedule estimates next week to verify if they are solid. That team's report is expected in late June.
http://www.tri-cityherald.com/news/1999/0513.html#anchor596414

ANOTHER $7.5 MILLION TO BE WASTED ON HANFORD'S FFTF REACTOR OVER NEXT 90 DAYS
Heart of America Northwest – May 4, 1999
Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson has decided to pay a Hanford contractor (Battelle), with a financial self interest in the restart of the Hanford FFTF reactor, to do another ninety day study on whether the reactor should be restarted. "The $17.5 million spent keeping the reactor on hot standby this year will be evidence in legal cases over the Department of Energy's failing to fund legally required cleanup and safety work over the next two years," said attorney Hyun Lee of Heart of America Northwest and Legal Advocates for Washington.

In a letter to Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson, U.S. Representative Jim McDermott wrote that: "[t]he reactor is not needed and would be horrendously expensive to restart, not to mention the serious environmental public health risk restart would pose… The decision that is made, must be one to shut down the FFTF. By deciding to restart the reactor, the Department of Energy will in effect be wasting millions of dollars and create large quantities of radioactive waste. Moreover, most ideas for an alternative mission would require transportation of large quantities of waste across the region. This is an idea frankly, that terrifies me."
http://www.whistleblower.org/www/hoapr.htm

HANFORD CONTRACTOR FOUND GUILTY OF ILLEGAL REPRISAL AGAINST 5 HANFORD WHISTLEBLOWERS
Government Accountability Project – May 7, 1999
The U.S. Department of Labor today issued a blistering decision against Fluor Daniel Northwest, a contractor at the Hanford Nuclear Site, for illegal management retaliation, including the termination of five employees who raised health and safety issues. The Labor Department ordered Fluor Daniel Northwest to immediately reinstate the pipefitters and pay them back pay, compensatory damages and attorney fees and costs. It also ordered "immediate and continuing cessation of harassment and intimidation and all acts of reprisal against complainants, or anyone of them, or anyone who acknowledges their support of the complainants for instituting or causing to be instituted any proceeding under the [Nuclear Whistleblower Protection Act]."
http://www.whistleblower.org/www/pipevicpr2.htm

ATOMIC TRAIN HEIGHTENS CONCERN OVER FEDERAL NUCLEAR WASTE LEGISLATION
Excite News -- May 12, 1999
ATOMIC TRAIN, a fictional TV thriller about a runaway train carrying toxic waste and a nuclear weapon headed for disposal, will not stretch the imagination of Nevadans as far as it might other viewers throughout the country. Since 1987 Nevada has been threatened with becoming the nation's sole site for disposal of high-level nuclear waste from commercial nuclear power reactors and nuclear weapons production.

Bills pending in Congress would send thousands of shipments of high-level nuclear waste to Nevada beginning in less than four years. The shipments, originating in 35 states with nuclear reactors and government weapons facilities, would travel on highways and rails through 43 states on their way to Nevada, coming within one half mile of over 50 million Americans and passing through more than 100 cities with populations greater than 100,000. The intent of the bills, II.R.45 and S.608, is to begin storing the nuclear waste in Nevada as soon as possible, in advance of a federal decision about the safety of underground burial at Yucca Mountain, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
http://news.excite.com/news/bw/990512/nv-against-nuclear-waste