There is so much more to be said about what is buried at Hanford, and what goes on living.
I was born at Camp Hanford in 1956 while my father was in Korea and, suffice to say, I’ve outlived it. Camp Hanford, that is. The encampment, including the quonset hut I was born in, was built in 1950 mostly to house army officers manning missile batteries to defend the Hanford site’s plutonium plants. The army post was disbanded a decade later. Of course, Hanford the atomic site remained, and still remains although the “mission,” as they say, has changed dramatically.
As I reported in a recent post about the dismantling of the last Hanford plutonium reactor, I used to have my own mission at Hanford. From 1985 to 1990 I worked with the Hanford Education Action League (HEAL) and other organizations to try to finally put an end to plutonium production at Hanford. By 1988, even the Reagan Administration grudgingly admitted that Hanford’s plutonium production was gratuitous and that it was time to start cleaning up the mess that forty some years of radioactive sluicing (involving vast sums of toxic byproducts) had left behind.
Just to get this out of way, yes, it is nice to win one once in a while. It is for good reason that plutonium takes its name from the Roman god of the underworld. I haven’t been able to fashion a regret for working to try to prevent more plutonium from being brought into the world. But there is so much more to be said about what is buried at Hanford and what goes on living, not just in the elongated half-lives of plutonium, americium and strontium, but in the way nature and people have to reach across time and memory for peace.
To be sure, I can never quite get to peace at Hanford. My hometown will forever be linked in history to Nagasaki, Japan, where more than 70,000 people died after a small ball of Hanford plutonium exploded above the city on August 9, 1945. And, yet, my connection to my home is through my mother and her parents, three of the most loving and spiritually rich people I’ve ever known. My grandfather, who lived in Pasco, sold life insurance, and died quickly from cancer at 78, was a rare spirit whose commitment to the joy of life, and the love this requires, was utterly complete.
So the gulf between good end evil in these parts is a chasm I’ll never be able to get my mind to 
bridge. I can see that the distance is miles across but being neither a saint nor a physicist, I can only work in inches. I know I’m not going to live long enough to understand or forgive it and this reality hit me so hard one day driving toward Rattlesnake Mountain, driving to work, that I had to pull the car over and sob for a while on the shoulder of the highway, just to drain some of the confusion and passion away, so that I could function again and see the road ahead of me.
At least the physical geography at Hanford helps to contain the vortex of these elements. The ancestral Columbia poured into the bowl that is the Pasco Basin and submerged it for millions of years before finally carving a large escape channel through the Horse Heaven Hills at Wallula Gap. Today, where the modern river flows out of the dam-flooded canyons of the Wanapum on the western edge of the Hanford site, it just looks like somebody spilled a large bucket of blue paint onto the desert. But, in fact, you are entering a geologic and anthropologic amphitheater where at least I can imagine the ghosts of the famous physicist Enrico Fermi and the Wanapum prophet Smohalla watching silently from the banks or the sagebrush above the waterline. God only knows what they discuss.
From the Vernita Bridge, if you’re drifting in a raft, or a boat as we were last Friday, it isn’t long before the pyramid-like silhouette of the Hanford B Reactor comes into view above the lip of the river bank. B Reactor is the world’s first plutonium production reactor, where material for both the Trinity test explosion and the Nagasaki “Fat Boy,” bomb was created in a big pile of graphite and uranium. B Reactor is a National Engineering Monument and it will be there, in its present configuration, for the foreseeable future.
It was interesting to me that my old friend Tom Carpenter gave the talk about B Reactor Friday and that he was immediately followed by a former Hanford scientist Brett Tiller, who gave the talk about the river.
I hadn’t met Brett before Friday but when he arrived early Friday in Richland to go with us on the tour it was with an introduction from Todd Martin (who replaced me at HEAL twenty years ago) that Brett is one of the smartest people he’s ever met.
“If Brett gets hit by a bus tomorrow,” Todd said, “there goes about forty percent of what Hanford knows about the river.”
Brett doesn’t work for Hanford any more, at least not directly. He recently set up his own scientific consulting firm, Environmental Assessment Services, that serves as a conduit for scientific expertise needed by Hanford contractors to ensure cleanup schemes conform with regulatory requirements. But, before starting EAS, he worked at the Pacific Northwest Laboratories (PNL) at Hanford where he had the unusual job of being an environmental detective, looking at different ways humans could be exposed to various radioactive materials that are leaking from the hundreds of old buildings and waste sites at Hanford.
One of his many projects at PNL was to research the Hanford elk herd which, today, is one of the most studied and talked about elk herds in the country simply because of how improbable it is given the harsh, arid environment. Two decades ago there were maybe a few dozen elk at Hanford. Today the herd is in the hundreds and part of the mystery that Brett and a small team of scientists at PNL were looking at is how this could be. How can elk thrive in an environment as hostile as Hanford? The short answer is, not easily, and one of the bottlenecks of their existence is this time of year when there is so little moisture to provide the green plant growth that the elk need for protein.
As we drove west toward Vernita to start the day Brett pointed to a recently burned slope and shook his head about what that meant in terms of constraining the herd’s already short supply of vegetation. If Hanford were just a desert the elk couldn’t make it. But Hanford is in a transition zone between high desert and shrub-steppe, the latter providing a rich abundance of sage and other plant-life that support elk and a variety of other animals. The recent Hanford wildfires, Brett pointed out, really knocked back the sagebrush and other shrub-steppe plants in the lower elevations of the site south of State Highway 240. Fortunately, he observed, the flanks of Rattlesnake Mountain have largely been spared the recent fires and the habitat remains fairly intact. Rattlesnake crests at 3,500 feet and supports two springs that provide a year-round source of fresh water for wildlife.
On the river, Brett spent quite a bit of time discussing clams and mussels which continue to be a focus of his research. Digs along the river reveal huge mounds of mussel shells, obviously left by Native Americans who feasted on mussels between salmon runs. The variety of clams and mussels changed, over time, as the Columbia River warmed (even before Hanford) and, today, much of the research is on smaller, Asiatic clams that live in the river bed.
One of the remarkable ironies at Hanford is the 51 mile long Hanford Reach (which President
Clinton declared a National Monument in 2000) is home to tens of thousands of “upriver brights”– large chinook salmon who excavate large nests called “redds” in the river’s submerged cobbles. In what he regards as a signal of adaptation to the massive barrier built up stream, Brett thinks the Hanford Reach chinook flourish in part because of the adaptation they’ve made to Grand Coulee dam. Unlike other west coast chinook populations, the upriver brights of the Hanford Reach are holding their own and, on this day, fisherman are everywhere in sight along the river, hoping to haul in one or two of the large fish (some exceeding 60 pounds).
On the way to the Vernita boat launch, I mentioned to Brett that I had worked years ago with Norm Buske, an oceanographer based then, near Davenport. With help from Greenpeace, HEAL, and the Government Accountability Project, Buske conducted independent studies of the river looking at how contaminated groundwater from Hanford waste sites made its way to the river. It was a hugely important question because, at the time, Hanford’s largely unregulated plutonium and waste operations in the middle of the site discharged literally billions of gallons of waste and process waters directly to the ground. The water flowed down some 200 feet through gravels deposited by ice age flood waters. But then the waste-laden water reached the upper aquifer beneath Hanford, and headed for the Columbia River.
While Hanford groundwater models projected a much slower and more uniform distribution of the contaminated groundwater, Buske theorized and then proved that this was not the case at all. Instead, as both Hanford and USGS scientists had warned many years earlier, the contaminated water was following high-speed pathways in the Hanford sub-surface. There were saturated channels in the underlying Ringold formation (the ancient Lake Lewis lake bed) which had been filled in with gravels and cobbles from the ice age floods. The contaminated water raced along these channels emerging into the river near the old Hanford townsite where the media savvy scientist from Davenport arranged for a Spokane TV station to film the underwater springs with a waterproof camera.
Buske, whose giggling sense of humor belied the fact that he took his work very seriously, had found his window into Hanford. And Hanford didn’t like it. They harassed him and even attempted to prosecute him, unsuccessfully, for trespassing on the Hanford shore. Norm received national attention in 1990 when he harvested mulberries from trees growing near springs on the Hanford shoreline, made jam out of them, and shipped a sample of the radioactive jam to the governor. While the prank got the public’s attention, it really freaked out the folks at Hanford, and certainly got the Governor’s attention as well.
So when I mentioned Norm’s name to Brett I didn’t know quite what to expect. But he immediately smiled and chuckled. Not only did he know Buske, he had actually sought out and consulted the renegade scientist with the tie-dyed t-shirts to figure out how he could learn from Buske’s discoveries and evaluate his methods. For example, Brett noted, Norm inserted a large tube into the river bottom to try to replicate the conditions that a fresh water clam would experience living in the river bed but also absorbing groundwater percolating up through the cobbles. When he reconsidered the problem, Brett said, he wound up concurring that Buske’s submerged tube idea really was the best technique for studying the uptake of contaminants by the clams.
Small world.
In the days I was following Norm around there was real menace to the Hanford shoreline, with armed guards, concertina wire and patrolling helicopters. The guard towers are now empty and the concertina wire is coming down. In the early days of production at Hanford you couldn’t even get on the Hanford Reach in a boat.
So, it’s nice that you can, now, and cruise the length of the reach without having to worry about much more than sunburn.
Tom’s plan, Friday, was to take the tour up to N Reactor which is situated just on the west side of the bend where the river makes an upside down “U” turn and then heads toward Richland. I was planning on taking a swim in the river at N Reactor, just really for the hell of it. I can’t explain myself better than that other than to say it was there, and I get easily bored in motor boats.
But from N Reactor you can already see the most beautiful part of the Hanford Reach up ahead. It’s the White Bluffs, where a visible portion of the Ringold Formation rises high above the river, like the proverbial White Cliffs of Dover. Aside from making for beautiful photographs (check out page 20 in Jack Nisbet’s elegant book for the Nature Conservancy “Singing Grass, Burning Sage”) the White Bluffs hosts also a rich collection of fossils, including the bones of pleistocene camels and mastodons.
So I lobbied, and got my wish. Tom gunned the motorboat up to the top of the Reach, beached it at the west send of the bluffs, and I quickly dove in and swam out into the channel.
Even in mid-September the water was comfortably warm, much warmer than the bone-chilling waters of the Spokane River this time of year. The Hanford Reach is the last free-flowing stretch of the river, so there’s also a brisk current, especially here, along the bluffs, where the water on the outside of the bend accelerates even faster. I noticed as I tried to swim back to shore that the current got even stronger as I tried to make progress toward the narrow beach beneath the cliffs. So getting to where I wanted to go was going to be a little complicated. That’s Hanford for you.
Otherwise, it really was a beautiful day on the reach. I’d been learning so much and so enjoying everybody’s company along the way. Now, the only argument I was having was with the river because I wanted to beach myself beneath the White Bluffs and the Columbia wanted to dump me, instead, in Richland 17 miles downstream. Fortunately, I won the argument. Just as I was about to reach shore the current suddenly broke and the river god even pushed me gently back the other way in a small eddy. I walked up on the beach beneath the cliffs, took a deep breath of majestic air, and looked upstream for my ride.
–Tim Connor
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