Twenty years ago, Hanford’s largest plutonium reactor was ground zero in a regional and national debate over nuclear weapons and nuclear safety. Today, it’s disappearing one chunk at a time.
For the first time in a very long time I got a chance to tour the Hanford site last Thursday with other members of the Hanford Concerns Council. The council exists to do alternative dispute resolution between workers and contractors at the site, and because we thought it would be helpful to become more familiar with the wide variety of cleanup activities at Hanford, we arranged for a bus tour.
Unlike the nation’s other big nuclear reservations like Savannah River, and Oak Ridge, you can actually see a lot of Hanford from publicly accessible roads, including state highway 240 that slices through the southern third of the site, between the ghostly, battleship-sized nuclear processing “canyons” of the so-called 200 Areas and Rattlesnake Mountain. On days like last Thursday, when sunshine cut through dark clouds throwing down ice and rain, the “canyons” 
inland and the massive old reactors along the river have the look of a nuclear Stonehenge to them. The closer you get to them, the more you can see how clearly they are of another era, like landmarks of a lost civilization. They are spaced for safety and security reasons in a broad circle, with the uplifted plate of basalt called Gable Mountain rising in the middle.
The strangest and most unexpected feeling I had all day was at N Reactor, which is far from Richland and on a short stretch of the Columbia where the river flows to the northeast, right before it dives toward the Tri-Cities to meet the Yakima and then the Snake. The reactor is still surrounded by tons of menacing concertina wire stretching in all directions. But it’s being torn down, chunk by chunk. The smaller part of it that will remain is still hotly radioactive and will shortly be cocooned, to make what’s left of N completely inaccessible.
It doesn’t seem that long ago that I spent a good share of my waking hours arguing about N Reactor. When I was at the Hanford Education Action League (HEAL) in 1985, one of our major talking points was that it was crazy to be operating ancient plants like PUREX (the massive plutonium extraction plant in the 200 East Area) and N Reactor when the U.S. already had literally tons of plutonium situated on tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. Spokane is almost perfectly downwind of Hanford, and we all know what’s downstream. For starters, N Reactor and the reactors at the Savannah River Plant near Augusta, Georgia, were the only large reactors in the nation that lacked containment structures required of commercial reactors. It was also indisputable that N Reactor was leaching considerable amounts of 
strontium-90, a dangerously radioactive fission product, into the Columbia River through two large, shoreline trenches.
But this was the Reagan years where the operative wisdom was that nuclear deterrence demanded that we have more than enough plutonium on hand to incinerate what seemed like every village with a police car on the Soviet map, even if it would plunge the globe into nuclear winter.
Then came the Chernobyl accident in 1986, and the specter that Spokane could be the next Kiev. To make a long story short, Chernobyl was the beginning of the end for N Reactor. As it turned out, the design of the Russian RBMK reactors, like the one at Chernobyl, are similar to the designs of the Hanford graphite reactors, of which N Reactor was the most recent iteration. That similarity and other safety concerns, resulted in the Energy Department ordering N Reactor to be shut down for safety reviews.
For that reason, Chernobyl was the beginning of the fiercest public arguments I’ve ever been involved in. I remember being on Spokane Public Radio one evening arguing, for what seemed like an eternity, with Larry Haler, an N Reactor worker who represented an organization calling itself the Hanford Family. Maybe we both won our arguments. With his visibility as spokesman for the Hanford Family, Larry would later become the Mayor of Richland and is, today, a state representative. He still works at Hanford.
But N Reactor never restarted after its Chernobyl-induced shutdown. In 1988, the Department of Energy announced, out of the blue really, that America really did have more plutonium than it knew what to do with. That meant N Reactor would never be needed again.
When I talk to other environmental activists who’ve been in fights like this, they often tell me they never know when to celebrate their victories, because victories are reversible, and you don’t want to get complacent. I don’t even remember what I did in 1988 when I heard about Under Secretary of Energy Joseph Salgado’s decision to keep the reactor closed permanently. I probably lifted a pint of Hales Ale at the Onion but, if so, I’m sure I did it warily.
When we arrived at N Reactor last Thursday morning, the power plant that used to generate 860 megawatts of electricity from the reactor’s waste heat was already gone. I asked the guide what happened to the turbine that was inside. It was right there, he said, pointing to a vast rubble field behind what was left of the reactor building. The reactor building itself was in the last stages of being eaten by backhoes and cranes, carefully eaten I should add, because the closer the demolition got to the guts of the unplugged reactor, the more intense the residual radiation field is.
It seemed that all that was missing was a large vulture to pick at the carcass of the thing. And then it dawned on me, that it really is over. Except, of course, for the cleanup.
–Tim Connor