Nuclear needs left land befouled

By John Krist,
Senior reporter

Within Hanford Reach National Monument, the Columbia River winds gracefully across an expansive landscape that still looks much as it did 200 years ago when Lewis and Clark paddled their canoes down the river to the sea.

RICHLAND, Wash. -- When Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led their small group of explorers across the West to the Pacific nearly 200 years ago, the Columbia River was a brawny, tumultuous waterway filled with huge rapids and waterfalls. As the Corps of Discovery navigated the treacherous waters in a small flotilla of dugout canoes, natives gathered along the shoreline to watch, fully expecting to see a spectacular disaster.

The expedition survived the Columbia without serious incident. For the most part, however, the river that challenged their aquatic skills is gone today, tamed by dams that inundated the rapids and waterfalls, and turned the Columbia into a reliably placid barge channel. The sole exception is a 51-mile stretch known as the Hanford Reach -- the last free-flowing, non-tidal segment of the biggest river in the West. Surrounding the Hanford Reach is a vast expanse of nearly untouched native grassland and sagebrush steppe, home to scores of rare species of plants and animals.

The story of Hanford's resistance to the settlement and manipulation that changed nearly every other square inch of land and mile of river in southeastern Washington is a deeply paradoxical one, a story repeated in many other places in the West. To put it simply, Hanford survived as an island of nature only because it was chosen as the place where human beings would unravel nature's very foundation. The landscape is alive by virtue of its role in the technology of mass death: the development of nuclear weapons.

Dry and blasted by wind, the plains just north of the confluence of the Snake and Columbia rivers in southern Washington were bypassed during the first rush of Western settlement. Homesteaders had their pick of easier places to raise crops in the mid-1800s, and they gave hardly a thought to the arid, sagebrush-clad region immediately east of the Cascade Range as they pressed onward toward the well-watered coast.

That began to change in the late 1800s, after gold strikes in British Columbia, Montana and Idaho. Steamboats were able to make their way up the broad Columbia River nearly as far as Priest Rapid, today the site of a dam about 40 miles upstream from the Tri-Cities area of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco. Towns sprang up below the rapid to serve miners bound for the gold fields.

Still, settlement remained sparse for many years. The area receives only 6 inches of precipitation a year, which qualifies it as a desert; sagebrush and hardy native grasses thrive under such conditions, but not much else. Ranchers took advantage of the vast grasslands to raise cattle, but farmers -- the raw material out of which permanent communities were built on the Western frontier -- looked elsewhere.

But in the early 1900s, two new arrivals changed that. Railroads reached the region, providing a more reliable method than steamboats by which to transport bulky agricultural products to market, and large-scale irrigation projects funded by local water agencies and, later, the federal government, brought ample water to the dry but fertile plains.

As homesteaders flocked to the area, three significant towns grew up along the river: Hanford, Richland and White Bluffs. Population and prosperity increased, slowing during the Depression, but recovering with America's entry into World War II, which pushed grain prices and demand to record levels.

In 1943, however, the federal government seized the Hanford, Richland and White Bluffs town sites, along with 640 square miles of surrounding countryside, evicting 1,500 residents and razing nearly every building. Overnight, a tent city sprang up, populated by thousands of construction workers, who quickly began work on a vast industrial complex along a swooping bend in the river. The purpose was kept secret; armed soldiers shooed away the curious. Even the construction workers were kept in the dark about what they were building.

As might be expected, rumors and theories abounded regarding the purpose of the installation: chemical or germ warfare plant, munitions factory, POW camp, bombing range, biological experimentation, even that it was to be a summer home for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his wife.

The reality was far more serious. Hanford had been chosen as the largest of three production sites for the Manhattan Project, the super-secret Army effort to develop the first atomic weapon. (The others were at Los Alamos, N.M, and Oak Ridge. Tenn.) The concrete buildings that began sprouting from the arid plains of the Hanford Engineer Works housed reactors and processing facilities for the production of plutonium, the key radioactive ingredient in atomic explosives.

Over the next 30 months, an army of workers constructed 554 buildings using 780,000 cubic yards of concrete and 40,000 tons of structural steel. They built 386 miles of roads, laid 158 miles of rail, strung 50 miles of electrical transmission lines and erected hundreds of miles of fencing.

The site was chosen because of its remoteness from major urban areas, the availability of water to cool the reactors, and an abundant and cheap supply of electricity to power the energy-hungry plutonium production process: Grand Coulee Dam had gone online nearby just three years earlier, and had a vast amount of surplus generating capacity. Eventually, two of Grand Coulee's 105,000-kilowatt generators ran full time just to power Hanford.

Plutonium produced at Hanford's 105-B reactor -- the world's first full-scale plutonium production reactor -- powered the first atomic explosion: the Trinity test at Alamogordo, N.M., on July 16, 1945. On Aug. 9, 1945 an atomic bomb containing plutonium from the reactor was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan. (The uranium used in the Hiroshima bomb, built using a different technology, came from Oak Ridge.)

Hanford played a central role in the nation's nuclear weapons program for the next four decades, undergoing repeated expansions during the Korean War and Cold War military buildups. By the time the last of its nine plutonium reactors was shut down in 1987, Hanford had produced 67 metric tons of plutonium -- two-thirds of the total produced in the United States for military purposes, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Hanford's reactors also produced something else: millions of gallons of radioactive liquid, and thousands of tons of spent fuel rods, contaminated equipment and other highly dangerous waste. Hanford is the nation's worst industrial contamination site: For decades, radioactive waste was dumped on the ground, injected into wells, released into the river, sent up smokestacks, contaminating the region's air, water and soil to an unprecedented degree.

Thousands of Hanford workers were exposed to unsafe doses of radiation, and "downwinders" -- people living in communities downwind or downstream of the site -- were exposed to radioactivity in the air they breathed, the water they drank and the locally grown food they ate.

In 1989, the DOE signed an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington State Department of Ecology establishing a cleanup plan for the Hanford site. The challenge is considerable: reactors must be entombed, millions of cubic yards of contaminated soil removed, corroding drums full of liquid waste exhumed, vast pools of water filled with spent fuel rods drained and the fuel somehow encapsulated; huge tanks containing millions of gallons of radioactive liquid emptied. Beneath the site lies a contaminated plume of groundwater the size of Seattle, inching year by year toward the Columbia River. It is, in short, a multibillion-dollar industrial nightmare that will take a generation to clean up and will remain dangerous for thousands of years.

But the Hanford legacy goes well beyond nuclear deterrence and radioactive contamination. Like many other military sites through the nation, the secrecy and danger accompanying operations at Hanford prevented the landscape from being farmed or urbanized. As a result, many of these military installations -- among them the Savannah River nuclear weapons plant in South Carolina, the Rocky Flats nuclear site in Colorado, the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory -- preserve large, relatively pristine remnants of habitat and populations of wildlife that elsewhere are imperiled.

At Hanford, those remnants have been recognized and set aside as the 200,000-acre Hanford Reach National Monument, established by President Clinton on June 9, 2000, where an overworked team is trying to manage a very difficult piece of ground.

Grassland and sagebrush dominate Hanford Reach National Monument, which preserves as wildlife habitat about 200,000 acres of federal lands formerly devoted to production of nuclear weapons.

Like so many U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service field offices, headquarters for Hanford National Monument is nondescript, operating out of leased space in an office park on the north end of Richland.

The office is woefully understaffed -- just a handful of people, consumed by the difficult process of organizing the public advisory committee recently formed to guide creation of a management plan for the monument, one that includes a wide range of tribal and user groups. It will be a contentious process: Many residents in this part of the state were angered by Clinton's designation of the monument, arguing that the surplus DOE lands should be turned over to the private sector so they could be irrigated and farmed like every other patch of ground in this area.

Paula Call, outdoor recreation planner, dragged out maps and aerial photos of the monument to provide an overview of the ecology and management issues the team faces (the monument is managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service because the agency already was in charge of the adjacent Saddle Mountain National Wildlife Refuge, which was wrapped into Hanford when the new monument was established).

Call noted that Hanford is nearly the exact size of Kauai, and is similarly a biological island. Surrounded by farmland, it represents one of few patches of relatively pristine ground in central Washington, and like all islands, is beset by invasive species and inhabited by many natives that are threatened or endangered. Most of them are sage-obligate species, such as sage grouse, sage sparrow, sage thrasher -- "anything with the word 'sage' in its name," said one of the biologists -- but also loggerhead shrikes, pygmy rabbits and others. Until a recent fire, which incinerated most of the prime sage habitat, the monument offered the best and biggest expanse of sage steppe in the state.

After the briefing, law enforcement officer Carleen Gonder offered a guided tour in her dusty green Ford Explorer. A petite, 50ish woman with long hair and a holstered sidearm, Gonder spends endless days alone patrolling the northern half of the vast monument. Her "vehicle" (she calls all cars and trucks "vehicles") was crowded with gear -- boxes of maps and files occupied the back seat, along with a backpack, bulletproof vest and other gear. A rifle and shotgun were mounted on the interior roof; a scanner and radio filled the center console and a large radar gun was awkwardly strapped to the dash.

Most of the monument is closed to all public entry, and a small portion is open only to daytime use. Gonder's tasks include chasing off trespassers, warning illegal campers to move on, making sure hunters and anglers are obeying state and federal game and fish laws, keeping an eye out for poachers and, in one notable case, apprehending artifact collectors for illegally disturbing archaeological sites.

should be allowed to camp and drive and shoot in all the places they did years ago, when the state administered much of the area land and was lax about enforcing the rules.

Gonder spent the next five hours driving around the monument, often on bad dirt and gravel roads, passing through one locked gate after another. She first drove up to an old homestead site on Rattlesnake Mountain, leading the way on foot up a ravine through drifts of tumbleweeds. A year-round spring waters the ravine, and charred tree trunks suggested it was once a lovely oasis. The spot offered a great view across the center of the monument.

Hanford National Monument is essentially a broad plain ringed by tawny, rolling hills, cut through by the Columbia River, which makes a great, broad loop through the area. In some areas, native vegetation such as sagebrush, rabbitbrush, brittlebrush and bunch grasses still cover the sandy soil; in others -- particularly where the fire burned -- cheat grass and other invasive exotics have taken over. Call said battling weeds is the monument staff's greatest management challenge.

From the bluff overlooking the river, the Columbia is a visual treat, curving gracefully through a sere landscape, its deep blue color contrasting vividly with the pale yellow of its high banks. Everywhere else along its length, the Columbia has been transformed into a series of lakes, and it is impossible to get any feel for the living river that Lewis and Clark rode to the sea. At Hanford, however, it flows surprisingly clear and powerfully, its current roiling and breaking into small rapids, running at 4 to 5 mph.

Although plied by motorized fishing and tour boats (many of the former, few of the latter), it beckons to the paddler. There are only two accessible put-in and take-out points within the monument, however, and no camping is allowed, so a kayaker or canoist would have to cover all 50-plus miles in one day -- a long, long day.

The view of wild nature is transformed into something out of a science fiction film, however, by the chain of blocky concrete buildings, smokestacks and electrical transmission lines strung along the river's south bank in the distant heart of the monument. They are the plutonium-production reactor sites, ghostly monuments to wars both cold and hot.

Gonder said she has spent many spooky nights driving patrol across the moonlit valley, listening to "the atomic coyotes howling" as the glare of artificial lights turns the reactor sites into eerie concrete villages, sparkling coldly in the silent gloom.

The entire atomic legacy at Hanford troubles her, Gondor said, voicing a concern common among Hanford-area residents. When the wind blows -- and in this part of Washington, that's pretty much every day -- huge dust clouds roil off the Hanford site, and who knows what exotic blend of isotopes those choking plumes contain? How safe is it to drink the water that comes from the tap?

These are not the kind of risks Gondor was trained to evaluate, and she said she didn't plan to stay long at Hanford. She dreams of Montana, she said, and her less stressful previous job: confronting troublesome grizzly bears in Glacier National Park.