WHY SERVICE LEARNING MATTERS FOR HANFORD Though I was initially perplexed about how to connect
students with Hanford, the reasons for involving young people are clear: cleanup will continue until at least 2052, and long-term stewardship of the site must occur to warn future generations about whatever waste remains. The pace of Hanford cleanup is tied to funding, and sustained public interest lets Congress know it’s a priority for taxpayers. As I got my toes wet at public events, I found that many
Northwesterners knew little about Hanford. The No Child Left Inside initiative seeks to provide children basic environmental literacy, which should include lessons about human impacts on
the environment. As someone who volunteers to help conserve wild places, I know it’s tempting to focus solely on projects with more tangible (and aesthetically pleasing) results, but the largest nuclear cleanup in the world, especially when it’s happening relatively close to home, should be a part of history and environmental education curricula.
So how to do it? Currently, Hanford is not included in any
state or federally mandated learning requirements for students of any age, so it’s up to educators to include it. As the following SL stories illustrate, Hanford-based projects do create mutually beneficial relationships between students and community members, enhance academic learning and address real-world community needs through active participation, and reveal paths to civic engagement.
WASHINGTON’S NUCLEAR HISTORY: THE HANFORD SITE
B, stood above the southern bank of the Columbia, facing the Wahluke Slope, a government-owned buffer zone for the 640- square-mile site. By 1945, the B Reactor produced plutonium that was used in the “Fat Man” bomb detonated over Nagasaki, Japan, bringing a swift end to World War II. Following World War II, the U.S. tried to “contain”
communism, launching an unspoken nuclear weapons race with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.). As a result, Hanford’s nine production reactors irradiated uranium throughout the Cold War. Between 1944 and 1987, Hanford created 60 percent—73 tons—of the nation’s plutonium stockpile. This procedure included transforming raw uranium into nuclear fuel rods, running nine reactors, extracting the usable plutonium from the irradiated fuel rods through a series of chemical processes, “finishing” the plutonium into metallic form, and managing all the waste these processes created. During Hanford operations, reactors were cooled with
Japan’s 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, brought
the U.S. into World War II and would forever change the Pacific Northwest. Since 1939 at the urging of European scientists fleeing Hitler’s reign, the U.S. had been studying uranium and the possibility of harnessing atomic chain reactions to create devastatingly powerful explosions. After officially entering the war, America’s urgency to build an atomic bomb before Germany increased. In December 1942, Colonel Franklin T. Matthias flew over the
vast, open, shrub-steppe tract just north of where the Yakima and Snake rivers emptied into the mighty Columbia, which framed the north and east boundaries of the land being considered as part of the Manhattan Project. It had all the desired qualities: small, movable populations of Native American tribes and farmers; ample access to cool, clean water and Grand Coulee’s hydroelectricity; and no city with a population greater than 1,000 within twenty miles of the planned manufacturing areas. The 1,500 residents were given varying amounts of time to
leave (two weeks to 30 days in most cases) and 25 to 50 cents per acre. Tribes were no longer allowed to use the area for hunting, fishing, gathering, or ceremony. An influx of more than 50,000 workers came to construct Hanford, making it the fourth largest city in Washington. Thirteen months after its excavation was begun, the world’s first large-scale plutonium-production reactor, code-named 105-
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35,000 to 115,000 gallons of Columbia River water per minute. After passing through a reactor once, water was sent to basins for varying amounts of time—from eight hours in the earliest years to as little as 30 minutes in the 1960s—allowing short-lived radioactivity to decay and the temperature to drop before returning to the river. Still, water boiled at outfall pipelines, and longer- lived radionuclides entered the river. Due to these practices, radioactivity was detected in river fish, plankton, algae, and the entire food chain near Hanford, and in shellfish as far away as Washington’s Willapa Bay. As a result of the plutonium-extraction process in the 200
Areas, 450 billion gallons of low-level nuclear waste liquids were disposed to the ground. The water table rose as much as 75 feet in the 200 West Area, and lakes began appearing where they’d never before existed. High-level waste consisting of radionuclides and various chemicals was transferred to 177 underground storage tanks with a combined total storage capacity of 125 million gallons. Sixty-seven tanks were either overfilled or leaked, causing at least one million gallons to infiltrate the surrounding soil. Other wastes originally designated for tanks were deliberately disposed to the ground by government directives. Any clothing, tools, failed equipment, or other materials
that came in contact with radioactive or chemical wastes were disposed in 72 unlined landfills. Up to 50 linear miles of buried, uncontained solid waste trenches still exist at Hanford today.
www.clearingmagazine.org/online CLEARING 2011
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