Oregon activates emergency operation center after tunnel collapses at Hanford Nuclear Reservation

Shortly after an emergency was declared at Hanford Nuclear Reservation Tuesday morning, state and county officials across Oregon convened a conference call to assess the situation.

Oregon has no regulatory authority over the former nuclear weapons plant, located in Southeast Washington.

But it has done extensive planning and regularly drills for the possibility of a radiation release from the site, the nation’s largest nuclear waste storage facility.

► Latest from Hanford: Tunnel collapse larger than thought, no release of radiation detected

By 10:30 a.m. the Oregon Department of Energy activated its emergency operation center in Salem, coordinating with the Oregon Department of Agriculture, Oregon Health Authority and nuclear safety experts at Oregon State University.

The concern, OHA spokesman Jonathan Modie said, is that any release could become aerosolized and spread.

“This is something we’re definitely keeping a very close eye on right now,” Modie said.

“If there are any detections of radioactivity within a 50-mile radius of the facility, we would work with our partners at the Oregon Department of Energy, Washington Department of Energy, and federal energy department,” he said. “We would likely send teams to the area to do air, water, soil and vegetation sampling.”

Hanford declared an emergency after workers discovered that part of a tunnel containing radioactive waste had collapsed.

As of Tuesday afternoon, there was no indication that any contamination had spread, said Destry Henderson, spokesman for the Hanford Emergency Center.

Still, all non-essential workers had been sent home, and non-essential swing-shift workers were told not to come in.

The Federal Aviation Administration imposed a temporary flight restriction, or no-fly zone, over Hanford at 10:35 a.m. Tuesday. It’s scheduled to last until at least 5 p.m. Wednesday.

Hanford is located on the Columbia River near Richland, Wash. It has more than 9,000 employees, some of whom live in Morrow County, across the river in Oregon.

Oregon Sen. Bill Hansell, R-Athena, represents that area.

“My part of Oregon would be the first to be affected. Obviously, we’re very concerned and following the updates,” Hansell said.

About 29,000 Oregonians live in the nearby communities of Boardman, Irrigon, Hermiston and Umatilla.

Beyond their immediate safety, Oregon officials said their greatest concern is for the farms and dairies in those communities.

Morrow County is home to the state’s largest dairies, including Threemile Canyon Farms, one of the largest dairies in the nation and supplier for Oregon’s famous Tillamook Cheese.

“If there had been a leak, we would be sampling that milk, making sure that it’s safe,” Oregon Department of Agriculture spokesman Bruce Pokarney said. “We would certainly not allow it to go anywhere.”

Both Morrow and nearby Umatilla counties also grow row crops including onions and potatoes.

The federal government produced plutonium for the country’s nuclear weapon program at Hanford for more than 40 years, creating huge amounts of radioactive and chemically hazardous waste.

An estimated 444 billion gallons of contaminated liquid was dumped into the soil, causing extensive groundwater contamination, and hundreds of former facilities are contaminated.

“Things that were done back in the ‘40s, we have found were absolutely huge mistakes,” Hansell said. “We’ve had environmental cleanup of that ever since.”

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, has been pushing for better cleanup at Hanford for years.

“Today’s cave-in at the PUREX plant should remind everyone that the temporary solutions DOE has used for decades to contain radioactive waste at Hanford have limited lifespans, whether they are underground tunnels for storing contaminated equipment or aging steel tanks filled with high-level radioactive waste,” Wyden said in a statement.  “The longer it takes to clean up Hanford, the higher the risk will be to workers, the public and the environment.”

Last month the Oregon House passed a measure urging Congress to continue funding Hanford Nuclear Reservation cleanup. It’s scheduled for a hearing in the Senate environment committee Wednesday.

Edwin Lyman, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the tunnel collapse is of great concern due to the potential for a release of radioactivity.

“It’s a wake-up call that there are risks across the nuclear weapons complex that are possibly quiescent, that can emerge at any time,” Lyman said. “I don’t think the Department of Energy is providing enough resources to address these issues with the urgency that they need.”

Another costly accident occurred at an underground nuclear waste repository in New Mexico in February 2014, when a drum filled with radioactive waste blew up. The facility was forced to close for nearly three years and reopened in January.

“We don’t know yet what the consequences of what happened at Hanford will be, but that has the potential to have a much more serious environmental release,” Lyman said. “They’re going to have to stabilize that site.”

A 2015 risk review report on the Hanford site, prepared for the Energy Department by the Vanderbilt University Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, said “various pieces of dangerous debris and equipment containing or contaminated with dangerous/mixed waste” had been placed in tunnel No. 2 at the PUREX plant.

The consortium of researchers who prepared the report said the PUREX building and the two tunnels have “potential for significant onsite consequences.” They described the primary risks at PUREX as being that an earthquake or other natural phenomenon “would cause structural failure” of the building or the tunnels “and would release much of the dispersible radiological contaminants.”

The report also summarized progress in the long-term environmental cleanup at the Hanford site and said more than $100 billion is expected to be spent on the cleanup during the next 50 years.

“Two tunnels combined have about as much or more of the isotope cesium-137 than was released in the environment during the Fukushima accident,” Lyman said, referring to details in the report.

He added that although the circumstances here are much different than the 2011 nuclear disaster in Japan, “I think that just illustrates that this is not a benign, low-level waste site but there’s a lot of really nasty stuff in there.”

The tunnel collapse also reflects larger problems at facilities that hold nuclear waste across the country, Lyman said.

“The biggest problem is just the lack of attention and resources on the part of the Department of Energy for dealing with these legacy issues,” Lyman said. “But the department has the responsibility. They own this problem and they need to provide the resources to address these issues.”

Some of the other nuclear sites with high-level radioactive waste include the site at Savannah River, South Carolina, and a long-closed nuclear reprocessing plant in West Valley, New York.

“In some cases, they’re dealing with a legacy of bad decisions that were made decades ago in the name of national security, and we’re still paying the price for that and will continue to do so,”

Lyman said. “The original decision to use these tunnels as waste dumps, it wasn’t unusual to do that. In fact all around the complex in the first decades of nuclear weapons programs, they did not think ahead about some of the practices for disposing of nuclear waste.”

Lyman said other unaddressed problems at Hanford and Savannah River – the two main factories where plutonium was manufactured for nuclear weapons – include tanks that are filled with liquid high-level radioactive waste and are in some cases unstable.

“Some of those tanks generate hydrogen and there’s an explosion threat, which they have to manage. Some of them are leaking,” Lyman said.

“There’s just a huge legacy of all sorts of radioactive waste,” he added. “There’s no solution other than spending the money and taking the time to stabilize it, to package it and to find a stable place to dispose of it for the long term.”

Reporter Ian James of The Desert Sun in Palm Springs, Calif., contributed to this story. Twitter: @TDSIanJames

Contact Tracy Loew at tloew@statesmanjournal.com, 503-399-6779 or follow at Twitter.com/Tracy_Loew

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