Hanford’s Impending Crisis

Joshua Frank has a superb story at Alternet (I think it originally appeared in the Seattle Weekly) on the incompetent and dangerous nuclear clean-up procedures at Hanford, in southeastern Washington. In many ways, it’s a story that we’ve heard before in recent years: the government contracts to a major corporation (Bechtel) to conduct major operations, but slashed federal budgets mean a weak regulatory process that allows the corporation to do whatever it wants. In the case of Bechtel and Hanford, this means cutting corners, seeking profit over the long-term safety of nuclear waste, management overrriding employees safety concerns, dismissing inconvenient science that would imperil profits, etc.

While this depressing story is part and parcel of early 21st century America, it’s all the more important here because of the potential for radiation poisoning if this stuff is not dealt with properly.

This is also a object lesson in why outsourcing government operations isn’t a good idea. I worked at Los Alamos for several years, doing historic preservation. But I knew people in various parts of the laboratory structure and the story was more or less the same–you’d have various corporations each seeking a piece of the lucrative environmental monitoring/cleanup/project pie. The incentive for everyone–the companies, employees, laboratory management–was to cut costs wherever possible and that often meant skirting the edge of the law.