At Hanford, over 53 million gallons of liquid High-Level Nuclear Wastes are stored in massive underground tanks which have leaked over a million gallons of some of the deadliest waste ever created on the planet. The leaks from the tanks have spread deeper into the soil and into groundwater moving more rapidly towards the Columbia River than USDOE claimed was possible as of just several years ago. USDOE’s effort to build the world’s largest nuclear and chemical treatment plant to glassify (“vitrify”) the liquid High-Level Wastes is years behind schedule and more than $8 billion over the original price estimate from 2001. The Plant, when competed in 2019, is projected to have the capacity to treat only half the volume of waste in Hanford’s tanks by 2050, leading Heart of America Northwest to challenge the calls to create even more liquid High-Level Nuclear Wastes in order to have Plutonium fuel. The nuclear industry is attempting to rebrand the melting down of fuel rods to extract Plutonium from its long held name of “reprocessing” to the green name of “recycling,” and touting it as a solution to the nation’s lack of a geologic repository for High-Level Nuclear Waste, especially following the withdrawal of the license application for the proposed repository at Yucca Mt., Nevada. The President’s Blue Ribbon Commission reviewing what to do with spent reactor fuel and High- Level Nuclear Waste has issued a draft report noting that the scientific consensus is that “reprocessing” does not reduce the need for High-Level Nuclear Waste geologic repositories, while there is no consensus on the proliferation risks, and recognizing that it does create new liquid High-Level Nuclear Wastes. The Commission’s draft report on the testimony presented to it is available for comment on its website (http://www.brc.gov/).

On the evening of March 31st, well over 100 concerned people attended an annual “State of the Hanford Site” meeting at the Red Lion Hotel at Portland’s Jantzen Beach with many insisting that Hanford officials take action to stop Energy Northwest from adding Plutonium back to Hanford for use in Energy Northwest’s reactor as well as urging that Hanford not be used again as a national radioactive waste dump. The responses from Energy Department officials to both of these top regional concerns began similarly by telling the audience that another entity or part of the Energy Department was responsible. After being pressed by the indefatigable Lloyd Marbett, who led efforts to shut the Trojan reactor for many years, Energy Department Richland Field Office Manager Matt McCormick said that he would raise the concerns of Portland’s public with Energy Northwest officials when he tours their reactor in April. One result of the outcry was Ken Niles, representing the Oregon Department of Energy, informing the public that Oregon would now be looking to be more involved in reviewing Energy Northwest’s pending application for relicensing to operate for an additional twenty years, in light of the Fukushima accident and the need to examine emergency plans. Two nights earlier in Seattle, the Energy Department’s McCormick had professed to being unaware that the Department’s own Pacific Northwest Lab was planning on using “hot cell” facilities in the southern portion of the Hanford site to fabricate the Plutonium fuel and to “assay” the test fuel rods, which would create new highly radioactive wastes. Several public comments then said that this undermined McCormick’s credibility and doubted that the site Manager would not know of a proposal to utilize a contaminated facility to produce Plutonium fuel in an area where all the other facilities were being dismantled.