ECOLOGY LEADS HANFORD SERVICE LEARNING: PAST PROJECTS
• UW students raise awareness about Hanford’s unlined radioactive landfills The first Hanford SL projects I designed involved raising
awareness about Hanford’s 200 Area radioactive solid waste burial sites. Ecology’s Tri-Party Agreement manager, John Price, wanted to extend the Nuclear Waste Program’s outreach to college students. He knew University of Washington professors Amy Hagopian and Holly Barker, who were already including Hanford in their graduate-level community-oriented public health policy program and undergraduate cultural anthropology course on Hanford, respectively. The public health students, just back from a Hanford tour,
wrote two research reports (“Protecting Health: Criteria for the Hanford Burial Grounds” and “Hanford Radioactive Solid Waste Burial Ground Position Paper”) that the Hanford Advisory Board, an independent, non-partisan group of diverse interests affected by Hanford cleanup, considered as they prepared their advice to the Tri-Party agencies. The cultural anthropology students created posters, started Team Hanford on Facebook, and hit the campus to spread the word. Thanks to their efforts, we had significantly higher attendance at the Seattle public workshop than we did in Hood River and Portland—a tangible result.
Seattle workshop attendees were offered an informative
flier summarizing the public health reports and heard testimony from some of the students. Through this process, the graduate students practiced developing and communicating public health standards. Both classes gained in-depth knowledge about the issue, worked in teams, and helped to educate the broader public.
• CBC statistics students shed light on new soil sampling method Ready to kick my efforts into high gear, I emailed just about
every college instructor in the Tri-Cities area who taught a class remotely related to Hanford. Linda Rogers, a statistics teacher at Columbia Basin College (CBC), responded saying she had two upcoming classes and very much wanted to work with us. The feeling was mutual. Having focused on visual art and English in college, I needed
help designing a statistics project. Ecology chemist Jerry Yokel volunteered stacks of soil sample data fresh from a professional laboratory. They needed to be compiled into a spreadsheet and analyzed. Linda and her daughter Kelly, a CBC student and
CLEARING 2011
aspiring cryptographer (cracking codes using math), spent hours preparing the data by independently entering it into spreadsheets and then comparing their numbers to ensure accuracy. The data reflected soil contamination levels in a dried waste
discharge pond in the 200 Area at Hanford. Our goal was to see if multi-incremental sampling produces similar results to the current discrete sampling methods used statewide: systematic and judgmental. This proposed change to Washington state soil sampling standards would save time and money and potentially improve soil sample quality. With systematic sampling, a contaminated site is divided into
a grid composed of 30 to 50 units, and a sample is collected from each. Each systematic sample is then analyzed separately, which is costly due to the high number of samples and the time it takes to process that volume of data. Judgmental sample locations are chosen using radiochemical detection equipment and professional judgment, and are also processed individually. But multi-increment samples are combined into one
composite sample and analyzed. With this method, a larger soil sample can be extracted for analysis at a lower cost than it would take to cover the site with discrete samples.
Sixty CBC students, along with Linda and Kelly, compared
the results of the soil sampling processes. The classes focused on the project all quarter, so instead of cranking out book assignments, they addressed learning goals by applying them to the data we provided. This process gave them experience with statistics while also practicing teamwork and project management. Because each student wrote a 30- to 40-page report worth 40 percent of their grade, they also practiced technical writing by explaining and analyzing the graphs and charts they produced. But do the three methods produce similar results? Overall,
few differences were found between systematic and multi- increment samples, which supports changing state soil sampling standards. They also found that judgmental sampling leaves the possibility of taking too few samples and taking them in the wrong places.
Our next step will be to repeat the process, taking samples
from a site with many “hot spots,” or areas of concentrated contamination next to areas with little to no contamination. Washington suspended most rule-making processes last year due to budget cuts, which pushed back revising the Model Toxics Control Act (MTCA) until 2012. MTCA is a state law guiding the cleanup of environmental contamination. This delay actually gives us a chance to further study multi-increment soil sampling, get others in the agency on board, and possibly revise the state standards in MTCA.
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